Digital Media Buzz > The Pros and Cons of Open Source

The Pros and Cons of Open Source

By Sharon Hill

When major social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and the popular iPhone have implemented open source for user features, the pros definitely outweigh the cons on open source code.

“Obviously I’m a big believer in the value of open source, though quality varies widely from the best to the worst,” says Jay Small, executive director, content and product development for Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group. Scripps uses open source systems including PostgreSQL, Python and Django; and Small routinely builds sites on Drupal for clients of his Web development firm, Small Initiatives.

The benefits of open source software, according to Small, are cost and community. “The richest and most robust  open source software stems from a large base of users, maintainers and developers working together,” he says. “The software may be free to download and use, or may even come as part of an operating system stack such as Linux. If it is well-known, well-used and well-supported, maintenance costs can be lower than commercial products. Mature open source technologies such as PHP and Drupal have large communities working on them and troubleshooting.”

Of course, not all open source products are well supported, as Small points out. “Without those communities, less mature open source code can be problematic. It can be expensive to operate and maintain  open source components that do not have a robust, mature community of developers and maintainers. You simply don’t have as many people to call when things go wrong, and fewer comfortable assurances that your applications will scale and serve reliably.”

Adeel Ahmad, founder and president of ShopSeen, says open source codes can be full of errors. His social shopping site is using Facebook Connect and Twitter’s OAuth open source applications for online registrations. “Be wary, especially with plugins,” he cautions. “A lot of these are done by people like me that have other things to do, and want to hack something quickly to solve a problem. You have to worry about how it is tested. And a lot of changes to open source code happen incrementally. You never know when they’ll be released — it depends on the person’s time. You have to wait.”

The Options are Endless

Small says that most open source Web frameworks including Django, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Joomla and even content management system Wordpress have optional modules and components to integrate content from social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. “Some of them even include components that let you build your own social network, cloning common functionality from the major social brands,” he says. “Or you can build a YouTube or Flickr clone — the components exist readily in open source code.”

In July 2008 Automattic created an open source Wordpress application for iPhone, under the GPL license. The application allows Wordpress bloggers to post from their iPhone after a seamless installation, and basically to complete all their blogging tasks including adding images — from their iPhone. “The biggest advantage for me is that I can see new comments that come into my blog,” says Steve Furman, a Wordpress blogger at social media and technology blog, ExpedientMeans.com. “I tend to write longer blogs — 300-500 words. My iPhone is not a place to do that, but if you are a blogger that does a lot of short posts you can do so from iPhone, and you can manage multiple blogs. The photo feature works just fine as well.”

Shopseen’s Ahmad is such an avid fan of the open source Facebook Connect product that the social shopping site eliminated its own online site registration two weeks after adding Connect and Twitter’s OAuth. “Most registrations are coming from Facebook or Twitter — they’re so much easier,” Ahmad says. The basic idea behind Facebook Connect is to protect Facebook users from having to share their passwords to yet another site.

“[Installing Facebook Connect] was very easy because the suite was built on Ruby on Rails,” he says. “Rails has a huge active, brilliant community, which creates all sorts of applications. The plugin is great, it’s still changing, and whoever uses it can add patches to fix any bugs. I did that myself — fixed a couple of bugs.”

Ahmad says that Connect is better and much deeper than Twitter’s OAuth, even though both are built on Rails. Twitter does give the developer a lot more control, however. “Facebook kind of hides a lot of that,” says Ahmad.

Connect isn’t the only open source aspect of Facebook. Songza executive Elias Roman uses Facebook’s Thrift as well as Connect. Thrift enables a number of Facebook features including mobile, search, notes and posts, all important for the music site’s search, sharing and streaming features. “Facebook referrals increased 313 percent [with the adaption of Connect],” Roman says.

For those still hesitant about open source, consider the advice of  IdeasMerchant’s information architect Spencer Hudson: “There are a lot of open source applications out there that can compete directly with paid-for alternatives. If the free one doesn’t work you can always revert to paying for one. It only takes some of your time to research and in doing so you will more than likely get a better understanding of what it is you are trying to do.”

For those who’d like to share open source ideas or learn from other fans, here are a few places to start: www.github.com, http://drupal.org/forum and http://rubyonrails.org/community.