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What Does It Mean To Be an Open Source Author?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 23, 2008 04:21 PM
from the other-side-of-the-fence dept.
from the other-side-of-the-fence dept.
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."
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I'll tell you what it means (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'll tell you what it means (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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Whenever I try out an app on a handheld that has some features that look suspiciously similar to my work, it makes me well up with self-delusional pride that, just maybe, that's my 45 minutes of actual work in there somewhere.
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Re:I'll tell you what it means (Score:5, Insightful)
How many computer science or software development courses include anything resembling:
To my knowledge, only a handful.
Parent
Re:I'll tell you what it means (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Just wait. Open source software never seems to go away.
Just the other day I got an "I clicked it but it won't install" email about a piece of software that works perfectly well if you read the documentation.
The sad bit is that this software hasn't been actively developed since 2002 and I still get support requests fairly regularly.
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I guess by that reasoning, a womb is a useless setting for a human embryo to develop. After all, the embryo gets no experience at all with such real-world tasks as breathing, walking, or eating.
It's possible to cram so much learning into four years of college precisely _because_ things are set up so that students are not distracted with the kinds of tasks you list.
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And I suspect if they included all those real-world lessons that we'll see far less CS graduates, from the sheer boredom. But I wish they had included those courses in my CS curriculum because now I would be doing something else, other than programming. I realized after I started working that programming for a small semester project is very different from programming in the real world and if I had gotten the entire picture I would have said, "this looks interesting, but there is too much stuff other than
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I'm nearing the end of my (yeesh) 5th year of my CS degree, and I think the best experiences I've had which are anything close to real world are the practicum courses I've taken. I'm currently a project leader in my capstone class, and I have certainly run into many of the situations which you've described. We were handed a classroom scheduling application which was originally written in VB.NET (of all things), rewritten in C# (not much better), and is now being ported to Java (simply because that is the
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Just like any other developer, except no paycheck (Score:3, Insightful)
People still expect some support, because you need that with software.
One word (Score:5, Funny)
but there are guarantees that (Score:2)
Like they say (Score:3)
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Allah, could I have just one experienced whore instead?
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"Yes. In life, they were all nuns, and they all have shotguns."
Release Early, Release Often Doesn't Serve Users (Score:3, Interesting)
I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.
I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.
I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there [oooforum.org].
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 [sun.com], yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?
That's just inexcusible!
I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.
That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.
I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.
Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.
And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman [kuro5hin.org]. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.
Re:Release Early, Release Often Doesn't Serve User (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Release Early, Release Often Doesn't Serve User (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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!
Parent
Those bugs have clearly been there for years (Score:2)
Looking through the OOo forums, many others have trouble with label printing as well.
I don't think the existence of those bugs has anything to do with my failure to report - and in fact I did report the bugs just a few hours after I encountered them, in my oooforum post linked from my original comment.
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There's reporting "labeling is borked!!" and there is reporting "with configuration X, running version Y, I had problem T and this prevented me from doing real work".. but yeah, if no-one is interested in fixing the bug, then no-one is interested in fixing the bug.. It doesn't matter if Sun is backing the project or not. If they don't consider it a priority then its up to you to fix it. Step up. If you can't code, post on the mailing list that you're willing to help anyone who can to reproduce the issue.
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Dude, speak for yourself.
Picking up a new code-base quickly is a skill that many people in the Open Source community have.. and you will never learn it if you're just defeatist about it.
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Re:Release Early, Release Often Doesn't Serve User (Score:3, Informative)
There are also label templates for OpenOffice but I think the glabel program will do what you want to do.
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I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.
Thats what we have CVS/SVN/Git and friends for. Simply don't release it in tarball form until it is ready, instead just dump it into a public repository and be done with it. The repository will make sure that no shareware sites pick it up and that distris stay away from packaging it. It will also make sure that the end user gets that it isn't done yet.
That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation.
It doesn't have to serve a need, it simply has to be there to take a look. If nothing else just to see that it is actually real and not just one of the thou
Re:Release Early, Release Often Doesn't Serve User (Score:2)
>>And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
Four years into it, a website, and no release? While that does sound like the majority of open source projects... I don't think that's a good thing.
Please. If you can't put together something stable and usable after a month, then you are Doing It Wrong. Start with a small workable tool, release it, open the source, and improve on it from there.
When I wrote CustomTF (an open source mod for Team Fortress for Quake 1, wh
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I'm working on a project I intend to open too. Like you, mine really isn't ready for public consumption. However, I am quietly tidying up my code, filling in some holes, and generally trying to make it useable/developable by someone who isn't me. Once that is done, I'll release it.
Maybe this is harsh, but isn't building the website before the
I can try under Windows or Debian (Score:2)
I acknowledge that Ogg Frog has gone far too long without a release - I never meant it to take this long. Some life events disrupted its development completely. But I'll get back on it soon.
There are two types (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe there are two types of open source authors. The first one is the hobbiest. I think the author of this article belongs to this group. Sort of a socialistic approach. Do work for the benefit of the community.
The second is a more capitalistic reason behind open source. Companies are big sponsores of open source. Companies can derive revenue through selling support, selling hardware or supporting an open source piece and selling a close source piece of software. Ubuntu, mySQL and google are for profit companies that support open source and derive revenue from it. For example linux kernel modules are often open sourced, so hardware manufacturers can sell more parts. Often open source advocates overlook the benefit from for profit companies that build a business around open source and in some instances alienate them. The GPLv3 for example has a clause often refered to "anti-tivoization", yet they followed the rules of the GPLv2 and release
the source code to the users.
My point is that the life of a open source contributer isn't always lonely guy in a basement somewhere turning out code hoping to get recognition. It could be a cushie desk job at google.
Does it mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!)
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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?
I'm an "Open Source Author" (Score:2, Interesting)
I mainly write tools dealing with games and game related file formats (used for mod creation, amongst other things), and some programs on the side regarding audiovisual analysis.
While some may find the release early, release often model to work, it's too incomplete for me and I don't use it myself. What I do is:
hardheadedness a good quality (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The names we give (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never written software (IANAP?) so I can't relate directly, but I've seen the term "author" used for someone who writes code before.
I'm curious: is this the best term to use? Is "author" a term of art in the the software world? Do those of you who create software prefer any other descriptor? Why "author" and not "composer" or "creator", "programmer" or "engineer"? I'm not aware of the various strata of people who code, but I'm pretty sure that the world of software "designers" shakes out categorically just like other fields. In music, there's "composer", or "songwriter" (which mean very different things) and "engineer" and "producer" (which can mean all sorts of things). In film it gets even crazier with "production assistant" and "producer", "director" (which can overlap), "set designer" and "art director" which can mean lots of different things, too. And of course, "best boy" which turns out to mean something quite different from what I thought when I was a movie-loving teenager.
So, would Laurent Cohen also use "author", do you think? I'm really interested in hearing from you software wizards and conjurers.
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According to the Microsoft PR rep.. (Score:4, Funny)
..that I met over the weekend, it means you're a "weirdo who ate too much paste as a kid."
I don't think that convinced the other guy to install a closed-source alternative to OpenOffice.
As an open-source author... (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, on the bad side...
Last time I checked... (Score:2)
...it meant you wrote code, and released it as open source. But maybe that's just me?
OS VS CS (Score:2)
Yonks ago when I wrote a door for the Renegade BBS system, I thought I'd be able to make some money out of it by selling it as Shareware. At the time there was an immensely popular game called "Legend of the fwibble bwibble (can't remember what it was called - something to do with dragons, I think)" which I and many other people registered, obviously making the authors some money. "If they can do it, so can I" I naively thought. What I didn't realise is that for every popular piece of CSS software that
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THE MORE YOU MOD ME DOWN, THE MORE NERDS I WILL PUNCH. SAVE YOUR KIND FROM THE RIGHTEOUS BEATING THEY RICHLY DESERVE AND MOD ME UP, PEONS, BECAUSE YOU FEARED ME THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL AND YOU WILL FEAR ME NOW. FOR EVERY NEGATIVE MODERATION I RECEIVE, ANOTHER INNOCENT NERD WILL HAVE THEIR GLASSES BROKEN AND THEIR TEETH KICKED OUT BY ME AND MY FRIENDS. NONE OF YOU STAR WARS FAGGOTS CAN STOP US.
NOW MOD ME UP BEFORE IT'S YOUR TEETH I BREAK NEXT, NERDS. YOU KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DISOBEY THE POPULARS!
faggots
Re:What Does It Mean To Be an Open Source Author (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I love the fact that the poster was listed an "Anonymous Coward"
Just kinda seems to underline the irony (or joke as the case may be).
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Re:How many open source advocates... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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That said, if you don't use FOSS because of ethics, I don't think we'd find much to agree on. I do use FOSS because of ethics.
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You dont have to code to help, bugreport help too. while ive not done any coding yet, i do take the time to support other users and submit bug reports, hell in one case i even submited a patch.