This post at Zope Dispatches starts to hit at some of the things that cause open source strategies to fray for me occasionally.
To set the stage -- I am a reasonably active user of open source (not Linux but Zope and Plone) -- I am also a consumer and supporter of Microsoft products (and various 3rd party tools both commercial and open source).
Some of the problems I see in open source:
- Lack of co-ordinated project management -- the decentralized nature of product development make predicting release times and features even more perilous than predicting the same for Microsoft products.
- Lack of marketing/product management - marketing is a two way street -- talking to customers about your product and talking to customers about their needs and facilitating information flow both ways.
- Product direction is usually in the hands of developers -- they want to develop what is neat, new -- not necessarily what end users want or need. The result seems to be some good stuff ( Linux, Zope, Plone) but also thousands of "Abandonware" projects.
- Open source promoters seem to include a disproportionate number of zealots who rely on FUD and Holy Roller type committment to "the cause" of bringing down the "evil empire". This gets very tiresome -- and leads to the mistaken impression in much of the general computing consumer that open source has nothing much else to offer other than fanaticism. In the end I think the fanatics do the whole open source community a huge disservice.
