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.
No different from any other software development really.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This article sounds like an advertisement more than anything else.
find / -iname life 2>
One of the very reasons the term "Open Source" was so heavily slammed in the early days was that it meant too many damn things to too many people (some of whom might also be damned). People, as a whole, adopted it despite those objections and often belittled those who raised them. Now we're finding out that some of those same people are finding out that Open Source does indeed too many different things to too many people, and that people really are trying to achieve different results. Congratulations. Should I break into applause or just do a Kerr Avon impression and throw these people out the airlock?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The checklist on the lower right is probably the best part of the article. It's all pretty obvious stuff when you think about it, but nice to have it all listed.
Maybe not
"birthing process"? Are we talking about software or pregnant farm animals?
That would explain why it would have a link that says "slashdot it" and not "digg it".
I didn't see anything hypocritical about it. He stated pretty clearly that the reason he didn't fork an existing project was because he couldn't do so and achieve his goals, and he gave several reasons. (eg. Nothing had the right framework for where he wanted to go, he wanted the experience of developing his own project, etc.) Also, immediately after the part that you quoted, he says:
I think he fully understands that people have a licensed right to modify the code, and is okay with this. He simply thought it was disappointing that people who do this often don't bother to make their changes available back to the developers. If anything, he was just mentioning that he wants to make his own project one where people are actively encouraged to do so.
It's not exactly a revolutionary article in FOSS development, but it's handy for anyone who wants a general idea, and hopefully people don't blame him for writing a simple article when it was Slashdot that decided to link to it.
Or better still - creep the acronym even more with FLOSSY - Free Libre Open Source Software Yeah! Also doubles as the name for a pet dog.
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.
The involvement of the person behind the project is really important. Submitting bugs and patches is one thing, but if none one looks at them, why bother? In fact it's a two way route: the more involved the original developer, the more people will take interest in the project.
I submitted bugreports on several occasions in various projects. Most rewarding was when I submitted a small bug in Magpie. I got a personal reply by mail from the original developer. Seeing how your solutions are considered by the developer and how your contributions matter is big aspect of what's open source all about.
The Open Source Definition was an attempt to formalize the requirements of free software, and any difference between the lists of open source licenses and free software licenses are due to nuances in interpretation, rather than anything substantial.
There is a philosophical difference between the main advocates of "free software" and "open source", it just doesn't matter for the majority of developers who just want to share something cool they have done. From my own days as a free software project leader, I'd estimate that for every developer discussing the ethical implication of various licenses on the net, there are 99 who couldn't care less about the license, and would even contribute their code to proprietary project if that had been necessary to make it available to others. [Of course, for every developer discussing the various licenses, there are also 99 non-developers with the mistaken belief that their opinions matter. ]
In conclusion, stop trying to create an artificial ridge between free software and open source when it isn't there or doesn't matter, depending on your point of view. It is 99% overlap, the remaining 1% is just enough for ESR and RMS to stand alone and feel important.