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."

Comments

Re:I'll tell you what it means

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:I'll tell you what it means

[chromatic]

Good stuff, minus the cheap shot at academia.

How many computer science or software development courses include anything resembling:

• Interacting with real users
• Changing requirements
• Deployment, packaging, and releasing
• Maintaining code for longer than a semester
• Prioritizing requirements
• Managing contributors
• Triaging bugs

To my knowledge, only a handful.

Re:How many open source advocates...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.