RE: Jakarta POI - HWPF for word files

Hi Bob,

you wrote on 10/08/2006 10:29:47 AM:

This is often the case with this "free" software. Most of the time, 

people are

doing it in the spare time, however frequently the unemployed (i.e.,
recent grad
students) are doing it to play in the sandbox and to get their resumes 

out

there. Odds are the "Maintainer and Main contributor" probably took jobs 

at

Google. 
This is the risk you take in using this opensource/free software.

I agree that this is a risk.  In the case of the POI HSSF subproject, it 
is widely used enough that the chances of it being abandoned seem low. The 
HWPF subproject seems to have been low on interest for its entire 
lifespan, so its abandonment probably shouldn't come as a surprise.

While it is true that some free/libre open source software (FLOSS) 
projects are the pet projects of one person, I don't think it's fair to 
paint all FLOSS with the same brush.  Some examples of open source 
software that is not likely to be abandoned are the Apache webserver, 
Apache's XALAN project, the Expat parser project, Eclipse, OpenOffice, 
Firefox, PHP, Python, MySQL, and the Postgres DBMS, just to name a few.

It is also worth noting that abandonment is a concern some many 
proprietary systems, thought the risk is usually farther in the future but 
perhaps less predictable.  I remember reading many articles by people who 
were very concerned when Oracle bought companies who had products for the 
iSeries.  In this case Oracle decided to continue to support the 
customers, because there were enough of them.  When deciding on any 
software, the size of the customer base (or "user community" in FLOSS 
terms) is an important consideration.  One of the benefits of FLOSS is 
that if the creators abandon the project, your migration is easier.  In 
some situations you can simply begin to maintain/update the software 
yourself.

I'm not trying to say that FLOSS is always better than proprietary, but 
don't dismiss all FLOSS as risky simply because it is FLOSS.
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