OStatic

This post by Dan Kusnetzky highlights one of the things that open source and free software projects have to contend with: Free isn't enough to carry the day.

A key challenge faced by any open source project is getting mindshare. Itﾒs a truism that if decision makers donﾒt know about a product, they wonﾒt consider it. If they donﾒt consider it, theyﾒll select other approaches. There are too many people shouting out their own Xen messages.

The developers of PHP announced last week that PHP version 4.4.9 is now available. This would not be remarkable in and of itself, except that the developers also indicated that this would be the last release of PHP 4.4. If PHP were commercial software, its end of life would be cause for panic in some quarters. The end of life of an open-source project works differently, of course. It does mean that the official development group will no longer spend time and energy fixing bugs in these old versions. But that's where the similarities between proprietary and open-source software ends.