Five reasons why your company should hire open source developers
 

I read this article this morning, what do you think?

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=821

The five reasons listed there aren't limited to open source developers:

1) Ask to see code samples from the developer. If a dev doesn't have code samples to show, don't hire. Cut and dry. OR if you're really still interested in them. Give them a timed test with some basic requirements and take a look at their code. We do both where I work, I'm in charge of hiring developers.

2) I don't know too many open source developers that code for Microsoft technologies... Then again I'm web based... but I'm sure most of you are as well.

3) Passion has nothing to do with open source...

4) This is not a common trait to open source developers. Someone that works on samba isn't necessarily going to know about Apache... And every web dev I know has had at least some Apache experience before. Skill sets are specific to individuals, not groups of people.

5) Doesn't even make sense at all... How does one person because they've developed open source tech suddenly have access to all open source support? And if you're a private company that's not developing an open source product, why the hell would you give it away for free?


There are definitely some downsides as well:

1) Open source developers are used to working on their own schedule at their leisure. That's why many open source projects take FOREVER to update.

2) When developing open source projects you have all the time in the world to make everything perfect before releasing it. In real business sometimes it's necessary to know what to cut out and what to trim down in order to deliver something to market with a certain speed.

3) Many times open source developers only work on one portion of the code and only understand a specific subset of the development rather than the full picture.

4) ... I could go on but your get the picture.


But once again, it comes down to the individual. Broad sweeping statements categorizing behaviors, skill sets, and profitability to a specific subset of developers doesn't work at all.

PS I've contributed to many open source projects over the years but usually only to patch or fix something because I didn't feel like waiting around for the slow development cycles of open source projects with developers that work on no fixed schedule ;)

i like open source stuff...