12 Apr
2011
12 Apr
'11
4:06 p.m.
In article <C9CA264E.3E294%geoffr at zipcon.net>,
Geoffrey Reed <geoffr at zipcon.net> writes:
On 4/12/11 3:16 PM, "Richard" <legalize
at xmission.com> wrote:
I think you have that backwards.
Either that or you *really* haven't spent much time looking at the
average open source project and only spent time looking at the good
ones you heard about by word of mouth.
Like most things in the world, you get what you
pay for with open source.
Some open source is crap, but much of it isn't, [...] At least with open source software, if something
doesn't work as you think
it should... You can fix it :)
Sorry, but I don't buy this either. Most open source software is
inscrutable to anyone but the original authors or current maintainers.
I say this as someone who has actually tried to follow through on this
adage. For anything but the simplest open source, "fixing" it means
spending a long time reverse engineering it first before you can fix
it, particularly if the problem is more than just dereferencing a null
pointer or something stupid like that.
I used to be money limited. Now I'm time limited. I don't want to
spend my valuable time debugging someone else's open source crap. I
want them to fix it from my bug report. Fortunately, most open source
software that is worth using has an active maintainer that is more
than happy to fix your bugs. For the stuff with no active maintainer,
its generally not worth it to reverse engineer their source base in
order to fix it yourself.
Try fixing something in gcc on your own without having worked on it
before, for instance.
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