Using an open source library for a critical feature of an application

Question

I just started working on a project, and customizable dashboards is the main functionality of it. The dashboards consist of draggable and resizable boxes.

Now when we decided that IE11 will be supported as well, it turned out that the drag functionality performance is extremely bad on IE11, and it is an internal issue of the library that we are using.

https://github.com/tiberiuzuld/angular-gridster2

About this library:

• 20 total questions about it on stack overflow.
• 494 github stars
• One active contributor
• 7k npmjs weekly downloads which is not a lot
• I've opened an issue on the Github page of this library 16 days ago and there has been 0 activity or comments on it.
• We use Angular framework, and every time when the Angular version gets upgraded, this library version has to be upgraded, which will be a problem once this library is not supported anymore

The question is - what's the right thing to do:

• Implement our own solution for this from the ground up
• Keep using this kind of library for a critical app feature and be ready to fork the code whenever needed

Answer 1

Well it is called open source for a reason, what about helping to improve the library? If the creators won't agree with your change you can still fork the repo and tweak it as you like.

Building something like that from scratch is definitely doable, to me it sounds more like reinventing the wheel but if you do have the resources, do it.