Some tips and tricks

Resorting to open source technologies to get the best solution and cut costs seems a great idea, but one has to be really cautious and choosy when it comes to settling for an open source technology solution. Belur shares some tips from his experience: I think one has to be very careful while choosing the technology. There are many open source technology projects. Some of them have a good community behind them and a good development roadmap ahead of them. It means that these projects will continue to get enhanced and evolve over a period of time. So if you pick such software as the building blocks of your solution, you can get huge productivity gains. But sometimes, you may end up choosing a wrong open source component—a dead-end project with not many people working on it. In projects that do not have much of a future, you tend to get stuck in the later stages. Such projects do not have an ongoing development roadmap because they do not have a community around it. Such projects should be avoided. You just need to pick the winners. There can be times when you can get stuck in a strange jam with a problem that no one has ever encountered. Sometimes you have to spend hours solving the problem yourself because you are using the open source component in a way that no one else ever has. It means that you are open to the risk of having to go to the source of the project and try to solve a particularly strange problem. One should be mentally prepared for such issues. Last of all, you might have customers that say, “Can you produce me a security vulnerability report by a third party agency?” Fortunately, our customers are not like that, but if you are ever in such a situation, there are security agencies that do vulnerability and security analysis of products. They issue certificates for the tested products as well. Most companies that make solutions based on open source technology do not have such certifications available. Having certifications helps firms sell their solutions, particularly to enterprises. If there are issues related in getting the certification, then you will have to figure out on who will fix them.