For educational and organizational reasons?

In conventional corporate development environments, how much time are programmers allowed to, or comfortable with, searching, learning, evaluating open source? Or are the incentives structured around cranking out new code?

How good are programmers' project evalation skills? If you've been using open source for a long time, you can "smell" a solid project to build on, but until you develop those skills, how do you avoid abandonware or over-hyped, not-yet-working software?

Need to combine best code reuse with best coding.

This is just a rehash of the old "buy versus build" debate. Obviously its better to pick up and reuse a solid third party app rather than reinventing the wheel. But if that is *all* you can do then you can never stand out from the crowd because they have exactly the same technology available to them. You also need to have the ability to code new components to create functionality that never existed before, and do that before the rest of your industry can do it.

Oh give me a break. Any critic of open source software must admit, at least it's better than closed alternatives. Given that you may be stuck on some lock-in closed software app today, just run the darn thing on the old OS until you get a clue.

Meanwhile taking pot shots about the open projects still in beta, is a weak and short lived argument. What about the mature ones, ay?

Any way you slice it, open software; total systems (like Kubuntu for example) are the force to be beat. It's simply and overall the best, right now.

With open software you have, on the one hand, finished products, on the other you have easy and open tools and abilities to make custom changes, and finally and perhaps most importantly, the fastest, progreesively developing, total software set/system, ever known to man. You may not need to improvise. You can click the little upgrade icon and you're done. ...Talk about not duplicating effort. Come on. get with the program. Open programs.

Call me perplexed, Spanky, but who are you arguing with? Have you read any other post on the blog? It is emphatically a pro-open source blog, and always has been. Both Dave and I work for open source companies.

Are you reading the same blog we're writing?

As an open source champion, but an even bigger fan of effective code building/reusing, I would also throw out the importance of having a solid governance model in place. As Matt rightly points out, there is a lot of exceptional open source code out there. Key is how to best integrate that into your specific environments to meet your specific needs. Is the application you are building something you are going to resell, or use internally? Is it being used in mission critical environments? Will it need to scale? If so, how: scale-up, scale-out? How will updates and bug fixes be managed? And so-on. Particularly for enterprise-class applications where we typically need to accommodate legacy, open source, and perhaps even commercial elements, governance is a key issue.

Anthony Gold, Unisys Corporation