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:What Does It Mean To Be an Open Source Author

[One Childish N00b]

Troll or not, there something about this perfect example of a jock being foiled by technology that deserves a +5, Funny.

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.