Joe's Blog

Open Source or not ??

I have been trying to get the msi task working in the NantContrib which is an extension to Nant. There are numerous bugs within the template itself. Moreover no matter how I change the template it has some fixed format and I cannot change it satisfy my needs. Well, I could put it in as a feature request to the open source community. But when will it be done and can I consider this added in future planning. I am sure the answer is no.
There are few grouses that I have with open source and they are issues such as bug fixes and documentation which is poor. But overall I see them bring out several new ideas like Nant as well as aspects of continuous integration. Microsoft’s MSBuild and Team system looks very similar to it. The only difference is even though the idea could be a rip-off the idea from the open source community they have a better finish to the product compared to the open source.
Sometime back a friend of mine in a startup had to make the decision to go with open source or with a specific product for example from Microsoft and he finally made the decision not to go with open source. His estimations proved to him that he will not be saving significant sum of money from going with open source. I hope there was some serious study in this direction. There is another organization that is at present converting all its Linux applications to Windows based application. But it needs to be mentioned that there are several successful organizations that are using open source. I believe organizations should encourage and support the open source community since several great ideas have evolved from the open source community and therefore they actually support improvement in the software development arena. Hence software organizations should not consider them as competitor but as supporters to improve quality of the product which is what we all strive to achieve.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 9:15 AM