White Papers Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM | Page 8

Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM?

A ComTech Advisory Whitepaper

OF COURSE, IT MIGHT NOT WORK
It could also be argued that an open source strategy in this market is destined to fail, either by not achieving enough
adoption (companies with regulatory or shareholder exposure are historically suspicious of freeware, particularly
for critical systems), or perhaps even falling victim to its own success if there were widespread adoption of the
opensource product.

As we’ve noted many times before, there is no one
size fits all solution in the CTRM markets. If large
number of companies, spanning different markets
and commodities, starting pushing additional functionality back into an open source product to meet
their specific needs, the product may become too
bloated and complex for those companies seeking a
cheap and easy solution to address their limited requirements. As these smaller or even mid-sized companies turn away from adopting open source CTRM,
the product could lose support; Without constant
improvement and continuing adoption, open source
products can simply fade away, abandoned in repos-

© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2014

itories such as SourceForge and forgotten by almost everyone except
those that were the early adopters. And for those early adopters, should
that happen, the once promising vision of a shared solution would become the reality of just another custom developed software program.

Open source software is also not without its own set of administrative and support issues, including availability of quality technical
support, code quality, d