Sourceforge is a marvelous junction point for open-source software development. Browsing the hosted projects, however, one quickly becomes aware of some of the weaknesses behind an open development style:
- Bloating – Projects without a firm goal or development plan often grow into an assortment of superfluous modules, plug-ins, themes, add-on, etc., that do little to improve the software itself.
- Staleness – If contributors lose interest in a project, no one is held responsible for maintaining the code or releasing bug patches, leaving those using the software with an inferior product which may have critical security flaws.
- Updates – Unless the software has a built-in update system, early (and late) adopters have no way of knowing that a patch has been released other than manually retrieving the latest revision.
- Quality – With most open-source projects, code contributions come from a variety of users. There is no way of verifying the users’ level of skill or experience, much less detecting any malicious intent. All contributed code should, in theory, be moderated by the project leaders, but this soon becomes impractical for large projects with many lines of code.
