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It's the end of the year, and, as is my wont, I've been thinking a fair bit about the things I'm thankful for in work and in life. One of those things, that has positively affected my work dramatically over the last 10 years, is the role of community in programming. In particular, the tireless work of talented, unpaid OSS project maintainers. The folks who generalize solutions to benefit all of us, who listen to our complaints, who fix bugs, apply our patches, manage releases, and all the other good stuff that comes with responsible code parenting.
So there I am, feeling all warm and fuzzy and thankful, tweeting my thanks to the good people who make my life easier. And then Jeff Atwood, one of my favorite bloggers, goes and harshes my vibe. On Wednesday Atwood wrote a piece for Coding Horror about the responsibilities of Open Source project parents. Using John Gruber, creator of Markdown, as an example, he basically says that Gruber, after giving birth to a coddled and universally loved baby, has pretty much stunted baby Markdown's growth through poor documentation and not listening to its community, resulting in a a number of messy forks and general confusion about where things might or might not be going. Oh, the drama! Now, I'm not really up on my Markdown project history (frankly I prefer Textile for humane markup, but I'm weird like that), so I can neither refute nor confirm his claims. But it's a well-written article and certainly what his article did do for me was get me thinking further about what makes a great bit of OSS code into a sustainable, thriving OSS community project.
December 31, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/about-open-source-stewardship/228700102
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