Tuesday, March 1, 2011
How bazaar is open source development?
Open source development is much like a regular production environment, but bigger. In "The Cathedral and The Bazaar", Eric Raymond lists several key aspects of open source development including, releasing often, having lots of users, and extensively testing the code. Each key point made by Raymond can be applied to closed-source development, the key difference being that open source has more users willing to find and contribute to bugs, more releases for collaboration, and more people developing the software all for free. But is more really more? There will be more people fooling around in the code base introducing bugs, more unhappy users that want a more stable product, and more people with completely different programming styles and semantics mucking up the code. I'll let you manage a code base with over 1,000 collaborators. I'm sticking to a small team.
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I really have no idea what you are talking about, but I am sure that it is awesome! You are awesome!
ReplyDeleteI agree. People's programming styles are so different -- imagine a program with hundreds of contributors all with their own personal tastes. Whenever I inherit code from another, the first thing I do is auto-format the code to the way that I like it. For an open-source project, I'm not sure if the other contributors would appreciate that.
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