Support is both a weakness and a strength of open source. A weakness because few projects are able to offer support directly; instead, the core coders naturally prefer to concentrate on refining and extending their creations. As a result, absent solutions from major players like Red Hat or Ubuntu, enterprises have often had to scrabble around to find a company that will offer support for some of the less well-known free software packages.

And yet this decentralised support structure is also (potentially) a great strength, because it decouples an application from its creator, and permits many third parties to offer support. This, in turn, allows a competitive market to develop, which – or so economics promises – should drive down the price paid. All fine in theory, but in practice that market has not been very evident. That may change with the launch of SourceForge.net Marketplace, which describes itself as “The best place to buy support for your open source software.”

To say that SourceForge is an important site for the open source community would be something of an understatement:

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