Here is a nice article titled How Open Source Is Special by
Mitch Kapor. Without restating what Mitch states in his article, I agree with the drawbacks especially when you come across a new open source project that seems to address your needs. For example, a while ago, when I was looking for a Swing based diagramming/graphing and visualization components/framework to use, I found several : JGraph, JUNG, and Prefuse to name a few. I played around with all of them for quite sometime before settling on JGraph. But as I started getting deeper into it, I started facing some of the drawbacks Mitch discusses. However, JGraph has improved a lot since I first started using it and has since gained that reputation (another of Mitch's point), and has developed good responsive community infrastructure (yet another of Mitch's necessities for success) supporting its adoption. On the benefit side, I did not have to write my own graphing framework from scratch! That's huge. I just picked JGraph as one personal example, but the same issues and aspects are applicable to any open source project. You can read Mitch's article for full details because he summarizes lots of things about OpenSource in a very concise manner.
Quick and nice suggested read.
Quick and nice suggested read.
