Picture this: You’re the developer who has improved the efficiency of your application development team at a large bank. Your boss loves you, you’re expecting a nice bonus and, with less than two weeks to a holiday break, perhaps you’re looking forward to some “figgy pudding” or whatever it is you enjoy. What could possibly go wrong?
Just when you least expect it, an obscure, undernourished and underfed component breaks, bringing a business critical system down. Your job is to find it, repair it or replace its functionality, and fast.
Sound scary? It is – but the good news is that organizations are focusing on preventing these scenarios. In fact, in Forrester’s “2012 IT Budget Planning Guide for CIOs,” one of the top five IT technology priorities is to “significantly upgrade disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.” The question facing many IT shops is: “Does my business continuity plan appropriately address the use of open source software components?”
For many organizations, it’s an open question.
Forrester and others have been talking about the offset of the benefits and challenges with the use of open source components for years now. For large IT organizations charged with providing innovative applications that provide Six Sigma uptime, the challenges of ensuring against technical failure caused by open source components may not be well-defined. Thankfully, a large, worldwide community of developers exists that provide ongoing support and maintenance for thousands of high-quality open source components.
With the holiday season approaching, it’s time to thank this ever-growing community of talented software developers who endeavor to continually improve software components for the greater good. When you research components (try sites like GitHub or Ohloh[1]), you’ll see literally thousands of members of the open source community providing a level of support that any proprietary software company would envy.. If you’re one of the thousands of developers who is contributing to the quality and reliability of open source components, thank you – and don’t expect any coal in your stocking this year.
Happy holidays!
[1] Disclosure: Black Duck Software owns Ohloh.net.
