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Challenges of Being Open Source

With increased growth and momentum that open source is seeing today, it is natural that problems will start showing. Vineet Sinha lists out some of the challenges that open source faces:

Low Quality: "Beyond the open-source foundations, most open-source projects that I have used have had significant quality issues," says Sinha. He suggest that the community works together for a rating system for projects to describe the project quality, something on the lines of 'used every-day by 50% of users’ or ‘rated over 80% by users in terms of usability’ etc.
Virality: He says while he understands the virality issues in open source code, it is difficult to convince people that only a portion of these projects have viral code. "I have been a fan of the innovation that can happen on open-source platforms and in general recommend companies to help open-source communities in return for appreciation and indirect marketing to the community members, however, this has been hard because of the “won’t we then have to release our code”?" says Sinha.
PR: With increasing number of companies supporting open source, users end up hearing open source in so many contexts that they end up being disappointed in many circumstances. The solution that he offers is for projects to emphasize the particular strengths opens source brings to them, and actively promote the open-source projects which have enough mass that are being built mostly by companies as a secondary function of their core product.

Sinha however notes that these challenges are not faced by most of the open source foundations.

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