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I agree with many of the things said in the article. I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed list
by cool-RR 16y ago
I agree with many of the things said in the article.
I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them.
I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core parts of their OSS projects, without realizing that if they concentrated a bit more on the things that Zed mentioned, their project would become so much easier and fun to work with, and they'd have a bigger healthier community around it.
<Sociopathic rant> Sometimes when I see one of these projects, (let's call it, as an example, project FooBar and say that it converts between image formats,) I fantasize about forking the project, fixing up all the documentation to be good, make a good UI, give installers, make a nice logo, etc. Then rename it, sell it as a commercial project and become a millionaire, without crediting the authors of FooBar. Then I will drive in my fancy car to visit the core developers, and I will show them a wad of $100 notes and tell them: "You see this? This could have been yours. This could have been yours if only you documented your freaking code. You worked so hard on this code, and if you would have only taken care of the things around it, like documentation and binaries and design and UX, you could have made a lot of money. But you didn't. You suck." Then maybe for their next project they'll write freaking documetation. </Sociopathic rant>
- forensic 16y agoSounds like an xkcd comic involving the guy with the hat.
- nopassrecover 16y agoExcept the implicit intellectual theft. What you are describing is pretty close to the music industry's original purpose - bridging the gap between creators and buyers - and see how often that gets criticised (perhaps rightfully now) as vampiric.