Phlogiston Blue - Developing with Open Source Software

Aspects of Developing With, and Using, Open Source Software

[This paper is drawn from my notes for a talk given to the Oxfordshire branch of the British Computing Society in November 2005. The paper is a much updated and extended version of a keynote talk I first gave at the ACCU Spring Conference in 2001. This paper includes some material that was left out of the talk because of time constraints. The Oxfordshire BCS web site is at http://www.oxon.bcs.org/2005reports.htm, The ACCU web site is at http://www.accu.org/]

0. What is this about, and who is it for?

This paper is intended to help programmers and consultants come up with a considered reply when they are asked whether their company should embrace open source software, and how they should do so.

Open source is not going to go away, and it is now more than just the flavour of the month. So, sooner or later you will be asked about it, whether you wish it or not. Even if open source software was replaced next month by the 'next big thing', it isn't going away, and sooner or later it will be back in fashion - a sort of 'Goth-Linux' perhaps!

What I want to do is to give people some pointers as to what to think about and where to look for the information they need to make up their mind.

This paper is not about proselytising for open source. The are plenty of other people only too willing to do that - just point your browser at http://www.slashdot.org, and you can have people recite open source mantras until they come out of your ears.

Open source is not the panacea that some would have us believe. It is an extremely good method of program development in many circumstances, and elements of it make up an extremely stable platform for mission critical projects, but it will not rescue dying or death-march projects.

In this paper, I want to look at four basic components of open source:

What open source is
What open source is good for, and what it is not so good for
Looking after open source development teams

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