4 ms·

Some software does. Most probably wouldn’t if the author could be convinced to stop when it was done. Personally, I’ve shipped several open source libraries th

Some software does. Most probably wouldn’t if the author could be convinced to stop when it was done. Personally, I’ve shipped several open source libraries that are still in use in lots of places despite me not having added a commit in over 10 years. They do the thing, don’t do anything else, don’t depend on other stuff, and thus don’t have a lot of surface to attack. Imagine if the log4j guys had built their thing to spit out logfiles, then stopped before adding the bit where it can execute arbitrary code. I’m sure there was a version early on that did that. And I bet that version would still work perfectly well today. It was finished. It just needed somebody to not unfinish it.

usrusr 5y ago
An interesting perspective. A late youth hobby of mine was being active in a coding community that wasn't open source, it was "lost source": based around a piece of freeware that was literally lost to a local storage hardware malfunction. But it had an API and a decade of stability (as in lack of API change, not lack of crashing unfortunately) and that caused an amazing amount of creativity, cooperation and so. Perhaps this is an inherent weakness of open source: it's always easier to accept one more feature PR than committing to an API that remains sufficiently stable for that feature to happen in an isolated module. I'm not saying that its always better to strive for the API instead of inclusion, it's a weakness as much as it is a strength, but chances are many situations where separation would have been better will be missed. It's a cultural bias.
jjav 5y ago
> Most probably wouldn’t if the author could be convinced to stop when it was done. It's nice to view software as something that can be done. I cringe when people look at activity on commits and think that if there isn't continuous activity, the project is dead. Maybe, but it might also be complete. My most successful open source project in terms of adoption (it's packaged in nearly every distro) is one that is done. I wrote it about 10 years ago and other than one small bugfix it hasn't seen any activity since. It's useful, it's complete, nothing more to do.

usrusr 5y ago

An interesting perspective. A late youth hobby of mine was being active in a coding community that wasn't open source, it was "lost source": based around a piece of freeware that was literally lost to a local storage hardware malfunction. But it had an API and a decade of stability (as in lack of API change, not lack of crashing unfortunately) and that caused an amazing amount of creativity, cooperation and so. Perhaps this is an inherent weakness of open source: it's always easier to accept one more feature PR than committing to an API that remains sufficiently stable for that feature to happen in an isolated module. I'm not saying that its always better to strive for the API instead of inclusion, it's a weakness as much as it is a strength, but chances are many situations where separation would have been better will be missed. It's a cultural bias.

jjav 5y ago

> Most probably wouldn’t if the author could be convinced to stop when it was done. It's nice to view software as something that can be done. I cringe when people look at activity on commits and think that if there isn't continuous activity, the project is dead. Maybe, but it might also be complete. My most successful open source project in terms of adoption (it's packaged in nearly every distro) is one that is done. I wrote it about 10 years ago and other than one small bugfix it hasn't seen any activity since. It's useful, it's complete, nothing more to do.