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The Risk of Undetermined Longevity
In the commercial world, it is possible for a company to go out of business, creating a product orphan. This is a risk that should be weighed with any large commercial software purchase. For example, if you had switched your entire
user base to the Be operating system (OS), you’d now be suffering from the effects of that OS becoming, essentially, an orphan. This same risk applies to open source projects. The development team may lose interest or because of
other circumstances may no longer be able to provide continued development and support for the project. Again, this is less likely to be true of the larger projects such as Linux, which most likely isn’t going to be orphaned anytime soon (if ever). Many of these larger projects have corporate or university support to help sustain development and support efforts.
Also, if an open source product is orphaned, anyone with an interest in maintaining the project can do so because the source code is available. For example, with the Hypersonic Java database, the original developer could no longer spend the time to maintain the product, but the community has since picked up and maintained the project and has even been releasing new versions.
