Surely they are fun at the inception, but then comes maintenance, bug fixing, support, etc. Major contributors to important open source projects are paid employees at Sun, IBM, etc. Ubuntu seems to be a major money black hole. So ... can open source really compete with commercial software?
+6
A:
Yes, and they do it rather well. Do you know how many servers run Linux? How many websites operate off of MySQL databases? How many bloggers use Wordpress? The list goes on and on.
Jonathan Sampson
2010-01-03 17:45:00
+4
A:
I'd say open source is more sustainable than closed source. When a project is open, anyone can contribute. When closed, if the owner decides to cease the project, goes bust, loses interest etc then the project stops.
adam
2010-01-03 17:46:12
Oh really, how's that working for Markdown?
Nick Bastin
2010-01-03 17:56:44
Markdown isn't a project - it's a suggested specification. Sure there are implementations of markdown converters, which supports my point - because the specification is open, anyone is free to write a markdown tool. Why don't you have a go?
adam
2010-01-03 18:12:31