Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package?

3rd December 2011

My answer to What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package? on Quora

It totally depends on the software in question. If you are moving to popular, well maintained open source packages (things like nginx, solr, MySQL) you can often expect a large improvement in developer productivity due to the increased amount of tutorials, forums, mailing lists, irc channels and stackoverflow/quora posts you’ll have access to.