Sorry it’s taken me a while but I’ve finally written back!!!

The basic idea behind my response is that open APIs and extension frameworks for proprietary products are fantastic. But they only address one part of what makes Open Source Software valuable.

As Chris Hill says, different customers want different things. And OSS is by no means the answer for everyone. But the people who do choose it treasure it for a wide variety of reasons – extensibility is only one of them…

See the full post here http://twurl.nl/4ctqw0

This is certainly an interesting discussion topic… one that comes up regularly in my work as Product Strategist with Nstein. I certainly think some open source projects can be extremely effective and better than commercial applications. And I, like Chris, believe strongly in open source. But to choose an open source solution because “we can always rewrite it if we don’t like it” isn’t really viable for companies who do not see application development as their core business. Publishers struggle with this all the time. Sometimes having a world-class vendor providing support and responsible for the product vision is preferable. One area where I see this is in making the hard choices that separate a great product from a toolkit or a tinkerer’s paradise that drives the end users crazy.

I often contend that as something gets more complex, its ultimate success depends not only on the obvious features and benefits but also on well-designed constraints. There is no reason why open source projects can’t be managed with constraints (Apache, Firefox, WordPress, etc.), but sometimes the end users just want to get work done with a minimum of fuss. I quite like Linux – and Ubuntu is pretty cool – but I’m now so busy that I pay Apple to provide me with a OS and software that just works without a lot of effort on my part.

At the end of the day, there’s no real “right answer” for everyone. Open source can become a dead end just as easily as commercial software (and maybe in some cases open source is at greater risk). Jump on SourceForge and look around – there’s a lot of dead open source projects (I’ve been waiting for almost two years for an LCD Smartie update and if I could find anything decent would pay for something less crash-prone!).