Vadim Motorine's Ideas Blog

The Tested Open-source Software Is Never Free

It is actually the part of the open source development model that the end user should test the software and report the bugs.

It you would not like to test yourself, you have to pay to the companies that test the open-source software for you and provide the support.

Roughly speaking open-source software is always in beta stage of the development and in many cases it is even in alpha one. In plain English it means that unless you pay or test yourself the open-source software is either not ready to use or simply dangerous to use.

The only exclusion is the very popular Open Source software like Linux because many uses tested it just because they used it. "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow". However even in this case you virtually always pay to get the stable build. You may of course make the researches and build Linux yourself, but the time is money and it is true for your time also.

In particular it means that popular open-source tools like Boost, ACE, Loki, and Blitz++ are not suited for commercial usage unless there are companies that sells the support for your particular operation system even if these libraries are ported to them. The point is that these tools are so large that usually it faster to write the program yourself than use these tools and then fix the bugs in their not supported porting.

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