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What Does It Mean To Be an Open Source Author?
lolococo writes to tell us that Laurent Cohen, founder of the open source project JPPF (Java Parallel Processing Framework), has decided to share what life is like for an open source contributor in general and little bit about what that means. "There came a time of coding, releasing, coding, releasing. The project started gathering some momentum, as a small community of users started to use it, but why was it not working in this case, or why did it not have this feature, or how could I do this, etc...? You get the drift. Oh my, now I had to start interacting with other folks! What was I to do? That started a (thankfully short) period of intense existential self-questioning. What was the purpose of this project? Why did I actually open-source it? I resolved this by deciding unilaterally that it would be a free contribution, for whomever would be interested enough to look into it. I also decided that it was my personal responsibility to support these brave folks into using the project, and to make it, as much as possible, a happy experience for them."
People still expect some support, because you need that with software.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No, it means having an always-accessable portfolio to show your skills without having to worry about making people believe you without proof, or "stealing" code from previous jobs.
It means "experience" for high school and college kids so that they can work on things other than the rather useless examples in the sheltered setting of academia.
At least, that's what it would mean if you leveraged it properly -- and that would mean further rent cheques from "real" jobs.
hell, maybe it means turning that side project into a real job that generates rent cheques -- even if those are the really, really rare exceptions.
How many computer science or software development courses include anything resembling:
To my knowledge, only a handful.
how to invest, a novice's guide
http://www.coderoshi.com/
None of the good ones, because frankly: what you listed is not computer science. If you have been through a Comp Sci degree and think it is, it is a condemnation of your school or comp sci in general.
Mod me overrated please.
Doing a lot of hard work, and then getting people to bitch about it incessantly as if you were their very own personal slave, all without being paid?
Ah, I kid: back when I was an active open source developer (for fMSX Amiga, for those that care) there were plenty of nice people too. And I got a grand total of 25 DMark for my six years of work! (and that's the truth!)
I think part of the success of some open source projects like Linux is due to the hardheadedness of the principle author. I think that generally releasing early and often is a good thing, but if you do it, you have to be prepared to be extremely honest about your intentions, and STICK to them.
That is, if people come crying to you for features, you have to remember that you have other priorities, and you can't be scared of telling people to show code or step back. Basically, TFA here is talking about feature requrests that will start appearing before the project has the infrastructure (developer momentum) to support them. In that case you have to simply say, "this feature will be available when someone gets around to coding it, I'M working on this other thing over here." In other words, you've got to stick to your guns, you can't let your users own you.
It takes a certain amount of jadedness to realize this, I think. At the onset of a new project, people want to attract attention and make potential new users happy, because they think this will help the project. But it won't; it will even be detrimental if you get "users" too early. Keep the *project's* health in mind, forget the users.. until the project reaches a level of maturity. At that point, if it's useful, it'll sell itself.
Just because you have no idea how Open Source works, doesn't mean you have The Answers.
The rest of us are getting along just fine without your mistaken insights.
It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?
That's just inexcusible!
Here is the irrefutable evidence that you don't understand Open Source (and can't spell inexcusable). Clearly, the only people who care about printing labels are jerks like yourself who are uninterested in even reporting the bug, let alone contributing some code or other support to make it work. This is the point of Open Source.. the software is what *you* make it. Sure, someone else might be willing to write the code for you, but its up to you to let them know what you want and to provide some motivation for them to fix it. Whining on Slashdot is not such a way.How we know is more important than what we know.
Is that why Opera, a proprietary browser, far outshines Firefox,
Matter of taste, Personally, I think the various flavors of Moz brwosers are better right now than Opera, although there have certainly been times when Opera was ahead. Quantifying "far outshines" would be pretty difficult in this domain.
and why Mozilla corporation is recording record profits?
There may be a few ideologues who believe it's morally wrong for any F/OSS company to make a profit, but they're in a distinct minority. Most of us "FOSSheads" as you put it are glad to see F/OSS companies making money, because it shows that there's a sustainable business model there. Make no mistake, F/OSS isn't going away any time soon whether there's money to be made in it or not. But there will undoubtedly be more of it if some of it is profitable.
Your 13375P33X-ing "FOSShead" is a strawman. Most F/OSS users don't use it because it's morally superior. They use it because it's good at a partcular task, because it's available for a wide variety of platforms, and because the price is right.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.