Open Source Software Turned Industrial but Perceived Quality Don’t Change

pen source development tools like MySQL, Eclipse, PHP or JBoss are now adopted by many software development organizations. Our last poll examined how the quality of open source tools is perceived against their commercial competitors. We conducted a similar poll twice in the past and it is interesting to compare the results.

Open source versus commercial tools quality
Same quality: 31%
There is no easy answer to this question: 25%
Superior in quality: 21%
Inferior in quality: 12%
I do not use open source tools: 6%
I do not use commercial tools: 3%

Participants: 913

Source: Methods & Tools

We can see that the results have not changed significantly compared to the previous polls. Even if the number of participants thinking that quality is similar has decreased slightly, a majority still judges that open source software development tools is as good or better than commercial products.

Open source is now mostly an industrial activity

The difficulty to answer can be explained by the increase of the diversity of management type for open source projects. We have seen a noticeable growth of the industrialization of major projects. This has been realized by different means: acquisition of open source companies (MySQL by Sun), industrially backed foundations (Eclipse, Apache) or funding by venture capital (SpringSource, Zend). Commercial involvement has also been noticeable in providing support to open source with hosted communities or forges (codeplex.com, code.google.com). Initiatives like the Google summer of code (code.google.com/soc/) provide also new resources to open source projects.

Money is certainly not a guarantee for higher quality, but it allows open source projects to have better development conditions. They can also do more promotion that normally increase their user base and therefore the available feedback that should feed product improvement. We are also at a time where the “natural selection” process has reduced the number of active projects in mature areas. Looking at the projects hosted by sourceforge.net or tigris.org, you can see that many tools have not evolved recently. I don’t see a lot of new initiatives to build open source web servers or databases. In other areas, like testing, new projects are more trying to build on existing solutions or porting them to a new language.

Second generation open source projects

Some open source sectors, like the web user interface, are however still trying to reach the same maturity level than IDE or databases. Many benefit from the experience of the first-generation projects. Companies to exploit the commercial side of open source are created from the start of the project. They attract venture capital and are managed by experienced open source executives, like Appcelerator that attracted a lot of former JBoss core team members. This trend in turn influences commercial players, as it can be seen with the initiative from Adobe to put its Flex code in the open source domain with the release of Flex 3. The initial assumption that open source software was created by a group of individuals working on their spare time outside a commercial structure is now less and less true today, especially for the main tools used by developers.

If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them !

August 13th, Borland's subsidiary CodeGear announced JGear™, a set of specialised plug-ins for the Eclipse open-source development platform. JGear augments Eclipse in three areas - Java application performance, visual development and team collaboration. According to CodeGear, the top pain points for Java developers using Eclipse stem from the difficulties of application performance tuning , Java code archaeology, coding and configuring Java servers and frameworks, team collaboration

The new JGear product line includes - JGear™ Performance for Eclipse, JGear™ LiveSource® for Eclipse, and JGear™ Team for Eclipse (both Client and Server editions). JGear Performance contains a variety of performance and tuning features such as memory and CPU profiling and debugging; automatic detection of potential memory leaks; and real-time monitoring of programs' use of virtual machine memory. JGear LiveSource includes a graphical EJB workbench and Web services designer; Unified Modeling Language visualisation of code artefacts and design for analysing an application's design and implementation; CodeGear's LiveSource technology that simultaneously replicates changes to models in the code and vice versa to aid alignment between software architects and developers; and creation of Enterprise JavaBeans and model relationships. JGear Team offers a complete agile team collaboration and development system based on open-source components. JGear Team is both a turnkey server solution and an Eclipse developer client solution JGear Team Server is a team development server stack based on best of breed open-source components such as Subversion, Bugzilla, Continuum, and XPlanner. JGear Team Server includes ProjectAssist™ - the JGear Team administrator client for simple single-click server installation and configuration, team project creation, user administration and setup.

This is a normal evolution for CodeGear as the future is difficult in the software development IDE sector if you want to remain the supplier of an isolated solution. Competition with open source and free products like Eclipse or NetBeans is difficult to sustain. A better strategy is to offer additional services that could be missing in the core open source solution and that developers are ready to pay some dollars to obtain. Acting like this in the Eclipse ecosystems, CodeGear recognises that its survival may depend on its ability to transform itself from software producer to plug-in developer.

http://www.codegear.com/
http://www.eclipse.org/