Modifying open source software seems like a perfect solution to managers - the solution is almost done, so surely it is just a matter of a few tweaks here and there, a splash of paint and Bob’s you uncle. Yeah - nah.
Yeah, nah indeed. He then goes on to describe a number of issues with getting mod-it-yourself open source projects off the ground, and the amount of aggro and/or cost involved in shoehorning it to fit your needs.
…Open source developers are very narrow minded - their contributions are to suit their specific need, which means every developer will try to include their feature, and unless the leads are ruthless, you end up with a application that has everything that opens and shuts, but that doesn’t really open or shut very well.
Other discussion of this can be seen at the man with no blog’s place.
I’m a big believer in the potential of open source and that’s why I chose to work for a company whose business is open source. And I think that because Squiz’s focus is a combination of both development (the devs, obviously) and implementation (the ’service’ end of the business — ie the ‘ruthless leads’), it’s meant that the development has been driven towards creating a system that addresses broader needs, not two or three unique cases that need to be hacked into submission to address something else.
I think a lot of open source projects (or indeed any project) could stand to follow a similar model of development — developers should be aiming to create things that can be extended to fit more than just a simple, single need. The problem is not with the idea of open source, it’s with narrowly-focused developers and a generic, extensible approach. Shareware and other commercial ventures suffer from the same difficulties.
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Look, places like Squiz are a different kettle of fish - they are a commercial software house - they have project managers and testers - if they break the software or make it unmaintainable, they go out of business. If other open source projects were run in a similar manner, the problem wouldn’t as pronounced.
It’s a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians - or actually in this case too many indians doing what ever they want and no chiefs to be seen…
Yeah, I know that.
What I mean is that even if freebies are run with a semblance of some sort of structure (people who focus on testing, etc) then it doesn’t have to be that way. As in, I’m agreeing with you.