Slashdot Mirror
The Birth of a FOSS Application
Joe Barr writes "Brice Burges explains why and how he created a new free software application, as well as what he learned from the birthing process, in a story on Linux.com. The story provides first-hand insights into the frustrations and satisfactions of developers working on free/open source projects. From the article: 'I'm always disappointed to hear open source project members say that they had "their developer" modify an aspect of the program without ever hearing from that developer or seeing any of the code. This is not progressive.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
I ran into an annoying little bug with Perl Win32::SoundRec, figured out how to fix it, patched my own system, and then spent 30 minutes trying to find info on where to submit the fix. I finally emailed the author and got no response. Months later, the bug is still there. The fix is three lines of code and two extra calculations.
I had some crashes with Mozilla and tried to get symbols, it turns out that the release build doesn't have published symbols so my effort to repro a stress bug and capture it in windbg was wasted.
In the pre-1.0 kernel days, I had problems getting two 3c509 nics to work in a box at the same time. With the help of a friend, we made a 3c509-2 driver by copying and changing all of the identifiers. The hack worked, but it was a hack. At the time, I didn't take the time to report the limitation anywhere or investigate further.
So, when I as a 99.9% user tries that 0.1% of the time to contribute, why is it always a pain? I would love to contribute. If the bar were lower, if I could take a 1-line fix and get someone to pay attention, or if I could take that bug and get support in debugging it other than "compile it yourself", I am sure my contribution rate would quadruple.
Maybe a college student has enough time to spend decyphering how to contribute. I don't have that much time anymore.