Succeeding with Open Source

Assessing the Product Team

Unlike opaque commercial development organizations, open source product developers are easily identified and communicated with. Each project on SourceForge lists the size of the development team and every member's identity and role, including an e-mail link. As used here, the term development team includes all participants in the project, whether their role is engineering, documentation, translation, or QA.

Product team membership can be easily identified.

The development team's makeup, experience, and commitment is, perhaps, the key risk factor in an open source product (in fact, it is a key risk for any kind of software, but is usually not directly addressed in commercial software selections). At the end of the day, ...