Comment by that_guy_iain
3 years ago
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk.
I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing.
There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that?
One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead.
Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc.
It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
> I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk.
I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.
You know why the site isn't littered with open source projects announcing they're getting abandoned? Because majority of the time the maintainers don't even care enough to announce it.
> They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
So, you've never had a commercial proprietary library your core product depends upon, being obsoleted and ceased support, without a license nor access to the code to keep maintaining it in-house? Because it happens, and I have.
And it's not just because the library was commercially inefficient, but because it got bought by a competing large corporation, who wanted to replace it in the market with their own solution, and wouldn't bother to support the library for its old users.
When this happens, at least the open source license allows you to keep supporting your use case by yourself, instead of being forced into the new solution being pushed by the vendor.
So the library got replaced with a new version? Happens in open source and often with less notice than with commerical products. And the idea of supporting the use case by yourself gets shot down. Also, you'll find money talks in these scenarios and you can pay for more support it just costs so much no one wants to do it.
> So the library got replaced with a new version?
No, the new library promoted by the vendor was utterly incompatible with our system, being based on totally different assumptions. So the library got replaced by an open-source library that did the same as the original and had a permissive license, which allowed my company to build a wrapper around it at an affordable cost.