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.

Re:Advertisement

[zurtle]

Agreed. It's not an incredible piece of journalism, but I like that it shows the classic stages of idea development when a great idea goes through that stage that requires perseverance and sits on the cusp of failure.

It also shows that small, niche, open source projects can survive. If anything, hopefully it will encourage a few dozen people to get onto Sourceforge.net and find projects they can contribute to.

Hypocritical

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But he felt it was entirely appropriate to simply start another project because existing mailers didn't have the feature he was looking for? I don't think that's progressive either.

Cute the defence of "but if he feels like it, why not?" Well, precisely. And if other developers feel like modifying aspects of his program without seeking his prior approval, why not? It's Free Software, isn't it?

Re:Free != freedom

[Osty]

The Free in FOSS indeed means freedom.

More accurately, the "Free" in FOSS means "GNU/Free", where RMS's definition of "free" is different than most. It's the "free" in GPL which means "free to do whatever you like, so long as your code is publicly available under the GPL if you publicly release your modified software." That's different than "open source" (BSD, MIT/X, etc) where you can do whatever you like with the source, even choosing not to redistribute your changes, so long as you keep the copyright intact.

Neither "Free" nor "Open Source" says anything about how project development should be organized.

How much effort should a person go to?

[deranged unix nut]

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.

reputation.

[leuk_he]

Most people choose a software program (if there is choice) not form their actual needed features, but a lot based on reputation. For developers this is a strange situation. the "Added Some Stuff Joe Thought Was Cool" feature might be nice for some users who choose just not to use it because Joe stuff has no reputation yet.

In the long run MS is right with their vista development recommendations [microsoft.com]. Not that i would recommend vista! It is just that their style rules make sense for 98% or the users. Users will go for the stylish look and later decide if memory consumption and stability stuff fits their needs. That does not mean you should build unstable software, it means you should spend some time polishing for dumb first time users and do some graphics.

The best thing linux ever did for this was choosing the penguin as a mascot.

Re:Free != freedom

[mwvdlee]

I've hade some bad experiences with "dictatorial" projects; you typically have to go through a lot of red tape in order to get simple fixes in.

I've sent in a one-line fix for an obvious and reproducible error a number of times over a period of nearly two years to a dictatorial project (Indy for Delphi) and they refused to even take a look at it, sometimes not even responding; I should become a member of the development team (which would require several steps) and submit a patch (which would require even more work). I think I'm still the only user of their project for whom the SMTP protocol actually works in all localles.

I understand that a singular vision is a good thing for a project, but these leaders should be aware that they don't shut out the end-user/-developer that only want to submit a single bugfix without a struggle.

Re:Free != freedom

[TheLink]

You mean "For painful experience". ;).

Linus doesn't really care about stability or reliability of a particular release, he's already basically said he just does what he wants - which appears to be putting in nice new features, capabilities to the kernel, and trying to make it more efficient in most popular scenarios (which is good in some ways).

Sure Suse etc have had their screw ups as well, but they at least do a bit more testing (they supposedly have more resources).

FWIW, an Alan Cox approved Linux kernel counts for more to me than a Linus approved one.