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Truthfully speaking - open source is great. However - for something that needs to be implemented in a production system, its preferable to create or purchase the code which is being used. Main reason is because of the lack of knowledge on who made the code. Are they qualified? Are they capable of creating code that can fit into your system and at the same time stay scalable and run at predictable speeds?
There are many reasons. There are times when open source does come in handy. For example, I like to look at open source code to see the different ways people solve a problem I may be going through or have already solved. Either to find a better way of doing it or for whatever reason.
Danny!
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If you use open souce, you can easily determine the quality by examining the code base. Just because a product is commercial doesn't necessarily guarantee it's quality. The company that you bought it from could be using coders straight out of college for all you know. And as many commercial products don't release the source code, it's easier for them to hide the quality of their code.
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Some people have an illogical fear of open source code, especially regarding the license. I once suggested incorporating the Mozilla browser component in our product and the idea was met with fierce resistance, even though the licence (MPL) is fully compatable with commercial software. I was impossible to convince people of this.
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Well the fierce resistance you may have faced might have nothing to do with open source whats so ever. Look at the todays current browser statistics. I believe the masses are still heavily using Internet Explorer. That may have been one of the many reasons why.
Another reason may be - who do you trust more - a monster software company capable of producing a patch, update, or whatever within a decent time frame or one that cannot? Not saying that mozilla cannot - im just thinking more from a business point of view - and how other business people would look at the solution to purchase. That is - the business people involved outside your company purchasing the product etc etc.
At the end of the day - both browsers are great - and do the same thing 
ciao!
Danny!
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Use of IE component was a non-runner from the start due to the fact that you aren't allowed to redistribute it, and it has a less sophisticated interface than the Mozilla component.
Besides that, I don't see how you can possibly claim IE to be great. US-CERT reciently advised people not to use it becuase of many security holes that still haven't been patched. See here: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64065,00.html
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... I have VS.Net academic. I can't sell commercial products because I do not have a license.  Oh well...
Aaron Eldreth
TheCollective4.com
My Articles
I hereby boycott this poll. Really....
- Leppie
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If there's a piece of code which is legally usable, why write it yourself (unless it just won't fit with your design)?
Of course, the bigger the open source stuff is, the more you have to think about it. A larger code base generally means a bigger source of bugs, which may mean extra work in the future to fix the bugs (either by doing it yourself or syncing your source tree with the original source tree).
--
Denn du bist, was du isst!
Und ihr wisst, was es ist!
Es ist mein Teil...?
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Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
If there's a piece of code which is legally usable, why write it yourself?
I guess it just depends on how lazy you are. 
Aaron Eldreth
TheCollective4.com
My Articles
I hereby boycott this poll. Really....
- Leppie
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Aaron Eldreth wrote:
guess it just depends on how lazy you are.
Yeah the weekend is a good time to write a webserver, SQL backend, and http preprocessor
top secret xacc-ide 0.0.1
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One reason is that people write that code in their spare times since companies don’t let them use the code they wrote on working hours. There's a lot of high quality free projects out there, but there's a lot of unfinished and buggy projects too.;P
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One reason is that people write the code in their spare time and therefore put a lot more attention and quality control into it, rather than the code that's written for a company while under the gun to meet deadlines, deal with changing priorities from management, changing feature requests from marketing, and being forced to work with junior programmers that create more problems than they solve. There's a lot of high quality commercial projects out there, but there's a lot of poorly architected and buggy ones too.
Marc
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
MyXaml
MyXaml Blog
Hunt The Wumpus
RealDevs.Net
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I fully agree with Marc.
Yves Tkaczyk
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Fully agree with Marc too! I think both views are valid and that Marc likes to play with words!
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The free code under my hands is an absolute and horrible pain (it interfaces Fortran, and the "industry relations manager" once described the code correctly as "written by six crazy scientists". Just as an example: a constant for 0 is named sometimes un (french), sometimes one, sometimes cx0). Variable names are typically two characters. comments? Use sparingly.
it is C code, and interfaces Fortran data structures. Fun. Imagine Obfuscated C Contest without the size limitation. And a very very bored C++ kid.
The problem being: I would do anything to get a coder who writes code like that being fired. I rather pay more taxes so he can live on dole, than he touching my code.
(Just for the measure: the other, boost, is quite readable for a template library, and well documented. And the one commercial library we use is a pain, though I don't know about code quality)
we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is Vonnegut jr.
sighist || Agile Programming | doxygen
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Not all open source projects are people just writing code in their spare time. For instance, I believe that Eclipse (open-source IDE) has a lot of backing from IBM.
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Sometimes I think people posting their codes to open source portal is to hope others to fix their bugs that they didn't see or have no time for it.
Sonork 100.41263:Anthony_Yio
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Apple's OS X is the poster child for incorporating open source -- it's based on BSD. The license on BSD is liberal enough to allow it, if it had been under a GPL license Apple would have had to look elsewhere.
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How do you boycott an electronic poll? Build an electronic protest sign and inhibit peoples access to the poll with some kind of boycott virus. 
Gary Kirkham
A working Program is one that has only unobserved bugs
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot
Me blog, You read
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I'm guessing here - but I would assume that leppie's reasoning is as follows:
1. CodeProject contains open source code
2. People come here to look at and download open source code.
3. People do this because they have a need for it in their current project
4. Their current project is most likely commercial in nature
Therefore, more than likely, anyone seeing this poll will be here to get some open source code to use in a commercial project.
--
Russell Morris
"So, broccoli, mother says you're good for me... but I'm afraid I'm no good for you!" - Stewy
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Ah.
I interpreted the poll as referring to large open source projects, i.e. risking the success of a commercial app on assumptions about integrity and performance made by frameworks such as Xerces, Apache, etc.
There's less risk in using open source (or public domain) code fragments, because they're easier to debug/replace if a problem arises.
/ravi
My new year's resolution: 2048 x 1536
Home | Articles | Freeware | Music
ravib@ravib.com
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leppie wrote:
I hereby boycott this poll. Really....
I completely agree, and gave you a 5. Why so many people have given you a one only leads me to the conclusion that there's been a few lobotomies.
The question asked by the poll:
...but would you include someone else's code in a product you have to guarantee and maintain?
is ridiculous. .NET is a "product". MFC is a "product". ODBC drivers are a "product". And there's a myriad of other commercial products that we use regularly in our application development. It's someone else's code, we have to guarantee our product so therefore we have to guarantee the third party stuff as well, and we have to maintain our product.
And frankly, having 10MB of source code from some place like DevExpress is pointless. I want it to work. I'm not going to bother fixing it. If it doesn't work, I'll use another option.
The only open source code I have ever bothered to look at and fix a few things is the .NET ADO interface for SQLite. And that's because it's so small and so easy to understand. I don't have time to get into the mindset of people who offer their 10MB source code behemoths.
The ONLY possible argument is that commercial products offer technical support. Woohoo. If the product didn't have bugs and was cleanly architected, they wouldn't need technical support, now would they? (Yeah, I know, that's a silly question, but think about it.)
Marc
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
MyXaml
MyXaml Blog
Hunt The Wumpus
RealDevs.Net
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I'm confused already. Does boycotting this poll mean Yes or No? From about 90% of your post, it looked like you were slamming Open Source: you have to guarantee it, and it is pointless.
But then you say the only thing good for commercial products is tech support. So, if you deny both options, does that mean you only make your own code? But then you don't even get tech support....
Reedmon29
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