Table of Contents
Coming from a background mainly involving information technology, there is a regular requirement to choose which solutions to use. This applies for both closed and open source options. Poorly selecting a project to include as part of a tech stack can be disastrous for the long term, regardless if it is initially superior on a technical level.
Usually there are many possible choices with a few that stand out performance and feature wise. Those which are orders of magnitude better both in terms of documentation as well as technical quality can then be shortlisted. The most challenging part is then deciding amongst those which have been shortlisted. There can only be one and the stakes are sky high.
My advice to anyone in this situation is to step back and observe the personalities behind the projects. This is far easier when open source projects are involved:
- Determine the tone from main contributors to their community of users. Are they respectful?
- Does the main contributor seem excited and overall enthusiastic?
- Is the overall community approachable?
- Most importantly, what is the perceived level of passion?
A stellar example of this could be the open source web server caddy. Matt Holt as main contributor is clearly passionate about the project but also the users. He can often be found helping tests pass and patiently answering questions no matter the skill level.
While caddy is already an excellent choice as a top performing web server, it reached its status because of Matt’s lifelong passion having started it during his time as a student over a decade ago.
A good counter example to this might be WordPress. While Matt Mullenweg does not seem to contribute code, he essentially remains the voice of the project. As of at least last year, an increased public interest has occurred to discuss switching from WordPress to a differing framework. My own blog is no longer based on WordPress.
Choose good projects based on personality that are made with passion and an obvious love for people to simply use their work, even if they are not as cutting edge.