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Why you need to evaluate sustainability

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When you’re considering free and open source software, whether for procurement or as a basis for developing new software, you need to take account of sustainability. This means evaluating whether the project is capable of delivering improvements and fixing problems with its products in a timely manner, and that the project itself has a reasonable prospect of continuing into the future.

We’ve posted on this subject many times here at OSS Watch, but this graphic from the folks at Black Duck is a good visual reminder of why this is important:

Pie chart showing project demographics

Source: Ohloh project demographics, via Open Source Delivers blog

 

This shows that a whopping 61.9% of FOSS projects tracked by Ohloh are considered “inactive”, while a further 28.4% have “very low” activity. Only 0.7% and 0.4% are rated as having “High” or “Very High” activity.

As a caveat, its worth noting that Ohloh doesn’t track all project activity, so its possible that there are some false negatives. Also, some projects have low activity because they are highly stable and mature. Its also pretty open to debate what constitutes “low” or “high” activity.

However, in general I think this is useful to highlight the importance of sustainability when considering FOSS.

For more information on how to go about evaluating sustainability, read our briefing note, How To Evaluate The Sustainability Of An Open Source Project.


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