I feel that I'm making a slow migration in my own skill set towards open source solutions, particularly at the level of my own personal (as opposed to professional) computing work. I mean, take away my personal laptop (which stays in my office many days following work) and there's no Windows platform in the house. Also, with the resolution of the SCO Unix suit, Linux is now a more solid option for enterprise computing support. With this in mind, I decided to do some browsing online and came across this First Monday editorial from several years ago, written by Michelle Levesque,. In the article, she analyzes OSS and its weaknesss. Importantly, she emphasizes that the identified problems are all solveable by the open source community.
One significant weakness cited by Levesque is "programming for the self" and the need to determine the target audience for an application prior to its design. Another is a lack of documentation; I came across another post citing this problem and attributing it to a developer-dominated OSS community.
Having attended a code4lib conference 18 months ago, I have to say that one of the weaknesses in OSS not cited by Levesque is the lack of diversity in the programmer community. Corporate vendors might have shortsighted business models, but at least their employees are typically more diverse than the attendees whom I met at this meeting.
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