On the adoption of open source

I have been working with open source products for quite a few years now. These have predominantly been Java based frameworks and other products. It used to be that there were only a handful of such products, which were available in the past. That picture has now changed. If you were to look at SourceForge, for instance, that site hosts over 130k projects.

With this rapid proliferation, one would be inclined to believe that the development community, in general, have wholeheartedly adopted open source. However, that might be an overly optimistic statement. The arguments that I have heard against open source are:

• The future direction of such products might not be in line with direction of the adopters.
• The adopters would still need to know the internal workings of such products, to understand their limitations and to quickly troubleshoot any issues.
• The needs of the adopters are so unique that they cannot be completely fulfilled by any open source product.

I am not sure if this movement has had a polarizing affect but I do believe that there have been different levels of open source adoption. At one end of the spectrum you find companies that have adopted open source to the fullest extent. At the other end of the spectrum, you find companies that have either resisted, been indifferent, or have marginally adopted open source. If you were to plot open source adoption on a graph, with the adopters and the non-adopters at either ends, the curve would be positively skewed towards people that have completely adopted open source. The curve would also have a long tail, towards the non-adopters, indicating the different levels of adoption.