Finding the silver Open Source bullet
A very well intentioned piece over at InfoWorld by Matt Assay ruminating on the lack of a recommendations engine for Open Source software. I was with him for a while, until his last paragraph:
The record labels - bless 'em! - perform the music selection and promotion process reasonably well. Surely a software analog is ready to be born....
Er... Surely that's Microsoft, Oracle, CA, Apple and the like isn't it?
Despite his rather wayward conclusion the initial point is still valid though. Here at Isotoma we are those Open Source Systems Integrators that he talks about and sometimes it's no easier for us to decide on the right software for a particular project than it is for a first time Open Source user.
The traction that a project has, the political environment that the software or component you are interested in operates within, the commitment of the core developers and a myriad of other factors all need to be taken into consideration alongside the more practical functional and technical requirements. Some way of demystifying those non-functional factors for the casual user would really enable users to maintain a positive experience of OSS (outside the likes of the biggest projects like Apache, MySQL etc.).
And with all that said, even the most stable projects can collapse unexpectedly (although, like freedb, they will likely recover).