“Open source is wonderful, as long as you know what you’re doing.”
(Richard Seidl)
Today I’m going to be the party pooper. Or the hall monitor, your call. I want to share a few thoughts on the risks of open source software. For many people, open source simply means “free software.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Licenses: The Risks of Open Source Software Start Here
Open source software may be freely available, but that doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like with it. And the jungle of licenses out there is huge. BSD, GNU, GPL, MIT and so on allow or prohibit commercial use, modification, attribution and anything else you can think of. A good place to start is this overview: Comparison of free and open-source software licenses
And seriously: pay attention to this. Ignoring licenses can get very, very expensive.
Maintenance and Support
Open source projects are community projects. You have to earn your support yourself, through forums, repositories and the community itself. Of course, you can check all of that before you decide. But it can end very quickly when the project and its contributors go quiet or turn their attention to other projects. Sure, that can happen with commercial software too, say when the vendor gets bought up. But at least there you have contracts that set a framework.
Quality
“Surely they’ve tested this”… yes, maybe. Or maybe not. In my experience, open source projects are usually well equipped with tests close to development. But I keep seeing projects with few business-level, end-to-end tests, and interface testing sometimes has gaps too. So if you use open source: don’t forget to test 🙂
Give and Take
It’s tempting: on GitHub and elsewhere, you’ll find open source projects on countless topics, like an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it’s not meant to be a one-way street. Open source lives on participation and community. So always ask yourself: what can I give back? Maybe you have projects of your own you could share? And if you’re not a programmer? Well, help the teams with feedback, feature ideas and, above all, bug reports. We’re testers, after all, right? This is where we can do the open source community a real service: with meaningful, reproducible bug reports. The community will thank you for it.
