Recently I was arguing with one of my friend over the beneficts of opensource frameworks over custom . I know there may be lots of posts describing the beneficts and drawbacks . But I just thought of writing it as I can say I have written about that in my blog. You can check it out .

I hope every one knows about opensource and the licences . I have been using and learning some of the most popular opensource frameworks like zend, lithium , drupal etc . So lets move on to what are the beneficts I feel .

Beneficts of open source :

1 ) Mainly community supported .

2 ) Coding standards will be followed .

3 ) Throughly tested and immediate patches will be available if any thing breaks .

4 ) Can get quick help from the community .

5 ) Flexible for maintaince ( ie not throw away prototyping )

6 ) Many do unit testing using the popular test tools like phpunit , simpletest etc .

Beneficts of custom :

1 ) Custom frameworks may be good for a developer as he knows what he has written . I don't think there is much beneficts for users .

Drawbacks of custom frameworks :

1 ) It will be developed by a single or some group of people.

2 ) May be tested by some group of peoples , but lacks the tests done by community ( mass of people )

3 ) Developing from scratch is not a big deal , but maintainence is the one that's costly than development . When its custom made , you may need to get the exact people for that . Else its like "too many cooks spoil the broothe". Pretty enough community developers, so not a big deal to get one.

4 ) May or may not be flexible . For example lets compare with drupal . When you starts your project , you may have thought just a small blog , then later you thought of having forums , after that you thought you need to sell some goods.

When its drupal like framework , its easy as you just need to maintain the common code base which comes with much of the features and some other contributed and custom modules will make everything fine . But when its custom , you may need to mess with the code , or may need to go extending it , which is not so easy like drupal or any other .

These are what I feel for now . May be more points , but for the time I am not remebering it . If any one feels I missed any , please add your comments I will update it .