[ba-ohs-talk] Risks in running Open Source projects
http://advogato.org/article/429.html
"What are the risks of running an Open Source Project? Every maintainer of
an Open Source project will always have issues that she/he needs to
mitigate all the time. what are the best way to do it?
Given the fact that the number of Open Source projects that succeed
compared to the number undertaken is a very low number, there seems to be a
big list of risks that all Open Source projects share that have to be
mitigated by all open source developers
I am not looking at the classic open v.s. closed projects and the risks but
taking it one step further to say that once an open source project has been
decided upon, what are the ongoing risks that the people on the project
handle on a regular basis?
Some of them that I can think of are
Declining user base interest due to various reasons
Not enough developers
Not enough funding (hardware, software, hosting etc)
Not enough product stability (not all software out there is Linux)
Security risks
Total cost of ownership is high since the software comes with poor
documentation and is an operational nightmare.
I would like to hear the thoughts of other open source developers in terms
of what are the risks and how they go about handling it. Please post your
comments and thoughts. I plan to write a howto on this so that all other
new Open Source development teams can benefit. " (01)