On 12/29/09 7:40 AM, Thomas Krichel wrote:
Brett Bonfield writes
I think Jonathan and Nicole nailed it with community health,
I beg to differ.
If you requiree a healthy community to start working with a piece of
software, how do you want a grassroots project to start? Obviously a
small project will start with one or two developers, and it won't
grow, until a few people work with it despite the fact that it's a
small thing to start with.
Requiring an upfront healthy community is particurly problematic is
a small community such as digital library work.
On the other kind, there is widely adopted software that I got
cajoled into maintaining, that consider bad. Apache is one of
them. I run maybe 50 virtual servers an a bunch of boxes, I am still
puzzled how it works and it's trial and error with each software
upgrade, where goes that NameVirtualServer thing into, the constant
croaks "server foo has no virtualserver". I'm not a dunce, but
Apache makes me feel I am one. When I look at these config files
that are half-baked XML, I wonder what weed the guy smoked who
invented this.
If I could do it allover again, I would do it in lighttpd. Oh well
it was not there in 1995 where I started running web servers.
Other problematic case: Mailman. I run about 130 mailing lists, over
80 have a non-standard config, I am running every few months into
problems with onne of them, despite the fact that I wrote a script
to configure all the non-standard lists the same way.
I agree with Thomas' assessment above. While I don't have the numbers
for this I think just like there are more termites than elephants in
the world, so too software programs. You can follow up that analogy with
the termites also weigh a lot more than the elephants. ;-)
I think most people look at software development by focusing on the
elephants and the ecosystem built around them which is frequently flawed
or buggered down with the "enterprise" crud that is inevitable with
keeping the community happy. (Do you really get a million hits?, you
should be so lucky)
IMHO good open source software is driven by people with an itch to fix.
The community develops and can be cultivated around this itch rather
than "world domination". The project _MUST_ well documented [0] ideally
actively maintained. The support of this software will mostly be taken
care of with good documentation.
I think the OP Eric was being too modest but your MyLibrary Software is
actually an example of good open source software -unless things have
changed since I last tinkered with it.
regards,
./fxk
[0] How to != Documentation
