How to Choose a Dependency: Build vs Buy, Risk Management, and More

A dependency is literally something your software depends on: infrastructure such as a filesystem or a database, network, etc. In this post, I'd like to narrow the scope to a software dependency that you need to compile/run, *i.e., a library. I'll first define what I mean by dependency in the context of this post. Then, I'll list a grid of several criteria to analyze possible dependencies.