What To Avoid—Known Problems and Failures

This chapter highlights some problems that can cause open-source projects to stumble. Hopefully, by being aware of them, they can be avoided in a project. The first problems can arise when people making decisions about whether to use open source for a project do not understand how open source works. A typical failure is for decision makers to not believe the philosophical tenets of open source or to believe one or more of the myths about open source. As a result, they decide not to use open source because they imagine there are insurmountable problems, or, even worse, they choose open source but have unrealistic expectations. The first case causes the company to miss a possible opportunity, whereas the second can doom the project to failure. In pure voluntary open source, there generally will be only one open-source project in a given area. Innovation and invention are still possible, but the open-source philosophy is, as much as possible, to resist diversity and instead to press forward with a single solution with maximum effort. It is a bad idea to create a new license for a project. One of the surest ways to cripple an open-source project is for the original developers to refuse to give up control. A big mistake many company-initiated open-source projects make is not actively marketing themselves and the applications they are creating. The underlying cause of a number of the mistakes discussed in the chapter is a lack of resources.