open source questions and answers

 

1 What is your experience with Collaborative development?
In my first company, we use lotus notes to build work flow for the client.

 

2 Based on you experience or simply your knowledge, how does community development differ from standard corporate development environments?
Community development requires more initiative, responsibility and enthusiasm.

 

3 What are your Open Source areas of interest?
I only interest in the areas which really are helpful for my development or personal life.

 

4 What has been your involvement with Open Source (consumer or contributor)?
Consumer: winmerge, 7-zip, audacity, mplayer, filezilla, jasperreport, log4j, mysql, struts, itext, openoffice, JUnit, etc
Contributor: drupal

 

5 What do you see as the key challenges to address in using Open Source Software?
Restrictive licensing: for example, GPL, not good for commercial products.
Integration testing cost: test all the potential problems in the integration which the standalone open source software haven't.

 

6 What is your familiarity with Open Source Licensing?
GPL: any product which use another open source product with GPL should follow GPL.
Apache license: almost no limitation, only mention the license if your project need it.

 

7 When have you used Open Source software, and what evaluation criteria was used to decide whether to use Open Source software or common off-the-shelf software (COTS) or custom code?
Since 2001 I begin to use some open source software such as openoffice and log4j.
If open source software realy meet requirements, chose the stable version to use. otherwise use the off-the-shelf software or custom code.

 

8 What is the difference between Commercial Open Source, Academic OpenSource, Community Open Source and Privately Funded Open Source?  Provide a popular example of each type?
I don't know how to say the difference.
Commercial Open Source:JBoss(software is free, doc and training isn't free)  Academic OpenSource: Community Open Source:log4j Privately Funded Open Source: eclipse

 

9 What are the pros and cons of open source software from a service providers perspective?

 

10 What are the pros and cons of open source software from a customers perspective?

 

11 When would you recommended the use of open source software in a solution?