November 19, 2005

Sometimes I just want to be a user

One minute I am sick and tired of open source and the other minute I am going at it again.
One of my biggest reasons to ignore opensource for a while, is that using opensource can be a real productivity killer for me.
To help me achieve something in my software, I "stumble" on a certain project that can help me in that effort. I start using that package and a at a certain stage I hit a bug or lack of functionaly to be expected from a piece of code (this is almost a rule, not an exception for me), you checkout the source to see if the latest is doing a better job and if not you start fixing it. So now you have to get familiar with the people behind the project, coding style, making tests and praying your patch actually gets applied. If this happens a bit too often, you get so distracted from your actual goals, that you don't have much time left to do the real work.
At a certain stage you are so sick and tired of fixing things, waiting to get things patched that you just don't bother anymore, or you just fork the code and happily fix it there and not contributing back anymore. At a certain stage you will have a go at it again and the process starts over.

Let me make clear that I love opensource and absolutely don't want to work without it, so this is not a specific opensource problem, since I hit a lot of bugs in commercial software too, but it's kind of hard to fix stuff (or figure out why it is broken) if you don't have the source :)

I wish I could be more of a user for the software I use, without feeling I am a tester, debugger and possibly a fixer for everything I use or at least try to find a nice balance.
Won't care about the balance if doing this kind of thing was actually also in my job description.

Posted by mvdb at November 19, 2005 11:54 AM
Comments
Post a comment