451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Learning lessons from open source failures
Matthew Aslett, January 30, 2008 @ 9:15 am ET“It ain’t how hard you hit…” It’s interesting today to see Matt Asay posting about the lessons he learned from (as he puts it) Lineo’s failure. I occurred to me that while open source bloggers/vendors are very good at pointing out success stories they are less inclined to share the lessons learned when things go wrong.
It’s only natural that people choose the sweep their bad decisions under the carpet, but in the spirit of open source, should the industry not be sharing the lessons learned for the good of the community? While there are one or two examples of third-party analysis of open source failures, there’s not a lot of insider information floating around.
I though I’d open up the opportunity for everyone to air their dirty laundry and pass on their words of wisdom. Leave a comment below with your story – anonymously if you prefer. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as an open source vendor/developer, and what was the lesson learned?
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