Summary
- Evaluate release cadence, maintainer depth, security response and migration cost, not licence price alone.
- Fund ownership, testing and upstream contribution before a critical dependency becomes an orphan.
Open source lets operators inspect defects, share fixes and avoid waiting for one vendor, which can shorten repair when a healthy community exists. The same freedom allows an unmaintained component to spread unnoticed. The next useful evidence is a dependency inventory with named owners, supported versions and a tested replacement path. Wider use is strongest when procurement recognises maintenance labour as infrastructure rather than treating freely available code as free operation.
