Simon Willison’s Weblog

Newsletter

What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package?

3rd December 2011

My answer to What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package? on Quora

It totally depends on the software in question. If you are moving to popular, well maintained open source packages (things like nginx, solr, MySQL) you can often expect a large improvement in developer productivity due to the increased amount of tutorials, forums, mailing lists, irc channels and stackoverflow/quora posts you’ll have access to.

Posted 3rd December 2011 at 2:17 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

This is What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package? by Simon Willison, posted on 3rd December 2011.

Next: Can someone improve their knowledge of programming in Ruby or PHP by using a framework like Rails or Zend, or does the framework just do a lot of the work for you without giving you an opportunity to learn from it?

Previous: How do events get listed on Lanyrd?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe