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Myths About Open Source Development
jpkunst writes "A thought-provoking article by chromatic on oreillynet, listing eight "myths" that Open Source developers tell themselves. For example: Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors. Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people merely using your code, much less those interested in modifying it."
You can use GCC's attribute system:
int foo __attribute__ ((unused));
GCC supports all kinds of cool attributes, both for functions and variables. For example, the ((deprecated)) attribute marks a variable as deprecated, and will produce a warning if any code uses that variable.
However, these methods are not portable. On nearly any compiler I can imagine, the cleanest and simplest way to supress an unused variable warning is to assign the variable to itself:
int x; /* shut up compiler warning */
x = x;
Run 'info gcc' to get the full documentation. Go to the "C Extensions" section. GCC is littered with HUNDREDS of very cool extensions. Just make sure it's worth giving up portability...
Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors.
;D
Myth: Stopping new development for weeks or months to fix bugs is the best way to produce stable, polished software.
Myth: New developers interested in the project will best learn the project by fixing bugs and reading the source code.
Myth: Installation and configuration aren't as important as making the source available.
Myth: Bad or unappealing code or projects should be thrown away completely.
Myth: It's better to provide a framework for lots of people to solve lots of problems than to solve only one problem well.
Myth: Even though your previous code was buggy, undocumented, hard to maintain, or slow, your next attempt will be perfect.
Myth: Warnings are just warnings. They're not errors and no one really cares about them.
Myth: Users don't mind upgrading to the latest version from CVS for a bugfix or a long-awaited feature.
For explanations of each RTFA
How many open-source developers you know that conduct large-scale usability tests?
I would imagine that many orders of magnatudes of more people have tried the lastest version of the Linux kernel as compared to Solaris, WINNT, and darwin kernels. Maybe that is not a usability test. For me I downloaded a few of the lastest Linux kernels for my desktop, I have found some good stuff, like performance increases. I've found some stuff was broke to hell, like sound and IDE when combined withe ACPI. You know what, these issues were already being discussed on the mailing list when I found them, and they appear to be working now that I am running 2.6.0-test11. Btw, I cannot get windows to play a dvd on the same laptop now that I have tried to patch it because of the RPC worms.
How many open-source developers go around interviewing end users?
I do. So thats one. How many closed source developers do this?
When the developer and product consumer is the same, open-source makes much more sense to me.
Hmm, sounds like the UNIX world to me. Built by developers and geeks for developers and geeks. Its working pretty well. All of the big boys are doing it now, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, etc.
Here's another common myth... "You can't sell open-source software". Not true! In fact, the FSF encourages people who distribute free software to charge as much as they want.