How to select open source libraries

We use a lot of open source libraries and components in our daily business. Open source libraries provide us a big advantage regarding time to market with our products. Every time when we are facing a problem in our software (problem is related to business domain to implementation domain difficulties) we first look into the open source world if someone has already solved that problem or even parts of it. Sourceforge, codeplex and google code (to name a few) are often the first pages we visit to look for code samples, libraries and frameworks. But how can we find the needle in the haystack?

When it comes to the implementation of a software architecture or user interface every software developer team comes to the point where a decision needs to be taken whether or not to reinvent the wheel. Before getting the hands dirty with implementing a own solution approach I encourage every team to first look around what kind of open source library could address some or at best all of the problems the team is currently facing. For me the process of determination which open source library could dramatically increase the teams velocity can be summarized like:

What kind of open source license is feasible?
The license is quiet important depending on the software and customer you are building the software for. For example in regulatory environment often only Apache2 is feasible.

What kind of problem needs to be address?
for example distribution, caching, persistence, loose coupling, Inversion of Control, MVVM, MVP, broker etc.

Read more: PlanetGeek.ch

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