Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Word to the Wise

If you aren't me, I don't think you can quite appreciate the number of conversations I have with people by email, phone, or in person about their "open source" educational project which, upon closer examination, turns out to not be open source at all. Beyond the technical definition of open source, I'm not really interested in "open source" projects which don't make their source readily available over the public internet.

Now, I'm not saying that people are necessarily doing this maliciously... usually they intend to release the code real soon now, and I know if you haven't planned your processes from the beginning to do this, it is a lot more difficult than you'd think.

But really, you can't imagine how many conversations of this type I've had over the past four years or so, and how rarely the code eventually appears. I've really lost my patience with this, and I'm afraid it shows in the tone of my responses lately.

The thing is, I really do want to see the code, because most of the code in school administration applications is crap, where crap is defined as not better than I can write myself, and while I might not be able to improve or completely understand your code, I can often quickly tell if it sucks, and if it does, I'm not interested in it, no matter what it does.

1 comment:

Chris Lehmann said...

And this is why the concepts of my old Beacon tools were good, but the programming sucked. I'm a hack.