Characteristics of Mature Open Source Projects & Gartner’s Hype Cycle

CSD Course, Fall 2008. Open Case Team Presents. KTH, Stockholm.

This podcast draws a distinction between “professional open source” and “open source”, where “professional open
source” refers to an open source project with professional technical support, in contrast to a project without
professional support. Also, showing the right investment time by using Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

1. Characteristics of Mature Open Source Projects
These are the important aspects which show that an Open Source Software is mature;
The software is backed by a foundation, a corporation, or a strong community.
The community is organized into groups, each responsible for separate tasks (the
maintainer, the documentation group, the development group, the evangelism group)
Project extensions are available.
The project’s license is acknowledged by the Open Source Initiative
(http://opensource.org)
Separation of documentations: User documentation, Installation
documentation, Admin documentation, and, crucially, development
documentation.
Separation of mailing lists: user mailing list, developer mailing list, security mailing list,
evangelism mailing list, etc.
Large-scale adoption and usage of the software exists by organizations and/or
individuals.
The software is easy to install. It has well-documented installation instructions.
Ported across multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac)
The software has a clean user interface. (GUI or command-line)

Referring to the points above, we still need to improve our solution a lot. Especially,
documentation and user friendly GUI is really important at this stage. Also, these are the
most important part of our whole product concept and when start up a company based
on this idea, company need to allocate time and energy to improve this value added
services for customers.
Consultancy
Implementation
Customization
Feature request
Subscriptions
Support
Documentation
Training

2. Analysis of Open Source and Networking
Many demands are placed on enterprise networks, and investing properly in network
and communications technologies requires an understanding of their maturity. Investing
too early in immature technology can lead to costly project failures and rework;
investing too late means missed opportunity. PC- Based Open Source will be much more
common on the market in 2-5 years. At this point, we need to increase the development
efforts and also prepare a whole product concept. This will encourage companies or
individuals to grab the opportunity at the right time. Referring to the graph below,
companies should accelerate their investment in technologies that are within two years
of the Plateau of Productivity. People generally are cautious about making large
investments in technologies that will take longer than two years to mature [1]. In
upcoming years Open Source will not destroy industry giants, such as IBM, Cisco and
Microsoft, but it will revolutionize software markets by moving revenue streams from
license fees to services and support. That’s why we should improve our whole product.
After all, Open Source is way of producing and distributing software, not a businessmodel.

CSD Course, Fall 2008. Open Case Team Thanks. KTH, Stockholm