Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
the author of this blog. Well-versed in the art of computer stuff, I'm currently the evil mastermind behind RunOrg, my Start-Up.
This blog deals with the Internet, random musings related to start-ups and marketing, and the occasional outburst of technical trickery. When random events don't require my immediate attention, I try to update it several times a week, so keep in touch!
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This is a very concise way of explaining the potential problems with open-source software. The first graphic in particular does a great job of simplifying what could otherwise be a complex conversation.
I have a history of building CMS and blogging platforms from scratch rather than using WordPress or Joomla, and the people I build them for always think I’m crazy. Sometimes it ends up being a waste of time, but most of the time the client has a weird request that I can easily build into my system but that I couldn’t have built into WordPress.
Also, when I wrote my blog post about open-source, I completely forgot to mention how making changes can break the update process. Great point. This is especially an issue with WordPress because major security holes are regularly uncovered, and if you lost the ability to update, your site could potentially become very vulnerable.
Waiting for the rambling that summarizes all closed source software, where, regarding only the plethora of freeware games and freeware software, figures should be similar
@Tyler King: hahaha, the entire reason I drew this series is precisely because I ended up drawing the first graph to explain that concept to people. It’s just too long to explain the thousand words that this particular picture is worth.
@phresnel: thank you for your comment! I suspect the diagrams will indeed be quite similar, and the “runs on platform X” diagram ought to be interesting as well!
You forgot an even bigger circle in the first diagram, one that would represent the feature set which is going to be implemented as soon as someone find the time to do it.
I believe it encompass everything, except – of course – that little function you really need. And that one. And that one, too…
@Emmanuel Deloget: that’s because you’re French. Never happy about what you get.
As a Blenderhead I rely heavily on open source software so am constantly balancing the benefits (extremely powerful free software) against the drawbacks – you’ve hit the nail on the head with many of these. A further diagram is needed for all the features you relied on in the previous release that seem to disappear in the latest “upgrade.” Great post!