The other day I was reading Jeff Atwood's blog post discussing why OO.o couldn't attract people to their open source initiative. He made some great points about it being OO's job to attract the developers to them by offering a worry-free coding environment and catering to their needs. I completely agree, but it really got me to wonder. When on earth do I have time to contribute to an open source project?
Now some my think I live a jet-set glamourus life with my spray on tan and my beautiful friends, but really those fun crazy times are few and far between. What my life really exists of is work(which I enjoy doing), development, Tivo, take-out, and Reddit. In that order. When I am doing development work I'm working on the parts of my project that I don't have time for during the day. The refactoring, the "not cutting corners", the things I didn't have time to do. Not just this project either. I've been like that as long as I can remember, about every project I care about. I'm thinking about the project, not something new.
Do you do open source? Most of you have children and families at home, I can't imagine that you have time between bed time stories and washing the dinner dishes to get to know a new project and care enough about it to get seriously involved.
I mean, I don't know about you guys but I get approached all the time by people looking for a developer that does "side work." "You can just throw something small together." Nevermind the reality behind "something small," but I always say "no, sorry, I don't have time." That's stuff I would get PAID for, not free.
Do I use open source stuff? Sure. Do I support the projects? Absolu. However, I definitely need a clone if I ever think about getting involved in one.
Let's say you're lucky to have a day job interesting enough to spend your evenings and nights on it.
ReplyDeleteThe shop I work in is unionized -- I'm not allowed to work all hours on my projects 'cause they'd have to pay me overtime. It's kinda nice to have a somewhat enforced work-life balance.
ReplyDeleteI've been working on an open-source version of website NJTheater.com (with the goal that with a small customization it could be adapted to serve any state).
ReplyDeleteI've been working on that for about a year a half (actually 2.5 years with a hiatus in the middle). I bought a laptop largely just for this project, and work on it during the train ride to from work (and ... um.. other times I'm on the subway), and on my lunch hour.
To be honest, all the open source that I have contributed to, or created my self (see http://codeplex.com/urlrewriter), have served a need in my professional life.
ReplyDeleteThe URL Rewriter that I mentioned, I created to mimic an ISAPI rewriter that my project was using, but it needed to work on the built in Visual Studio server. Many other people saw this as a great way to port their mod_rewrite scripts from Apache to IIS 6 and the project really took off from there. Now it is used on government sites, internal, external, and some non-standard IIS installs like Windows Home Server.
When I first started the project for my own selfish reasons, I never imagined everybody wanted the same thing I wanted. So I believe like everything else open source comes out of necessity of something missing in the market.
Nick
Well, some people get paid to make OpenSource projects, think Sun, MySQL, Apache, SQLite3, Ubuntu, KDE...
ReplyDeleteEven some Linux Kernel Developers get paid to develop OpenSource Software.
And the ones that don't get paid to do it are:
A. Students trying to get some sort of presentation card, for when its time to get a job, or making their THESIS;
B. University Professors, to get their students involved in a project;
C. Well, any one who can MAKE the time to code an OpenSource project, or to contribute to one :)
Bye!
I don't have a family and I live in a boring small town so I have plenty of time for side work. Currently I'm working on adding comment threading to the Elgg social networking platform. But I think I can only handle making small improvements to a web application. Open Office is probably a huge project that would take you forever to explore and understand the code.
ReplyDeleteI think maintaining a work-life balance is key to staying sane. No matter how interesting or boring the day job is, I always reserve some time over the weekend for personal projects. They could range from a simplictic calculator in a new language I want to learn to contributing to different open source projects that are interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt's basically the same idea as Google's 20% rule, where they encourage their employees to spend 20% of their paid company time on personal project, whatever they may be. As an example of how successful that has been, consider the fact that Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader were all personal projects that eventually were turned into end user products.
@Isaac, that is a great practice. I think that down the road when my workload is lighter I really want to get to that point.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea for OSS is more along the lines of: if you are using an open source project at work that lacks a feature you would go ahead and implement it because you have access to the source code then submit it to the project so everyone could benefit from it. Rather then the current closed source model where you have 10 different companies developing the exact same code.
ReplyDeleteJust because something is open source doesn't mean developers have to work for free.
Yes, I do use open source project. I agree with @Rodrigo Amaya some people get paid to developed other open source project. But as human being we work to live long in our planet to have shelter. But then using open source project is a best choice than the precious software in the market.
ReplyDeletenice post
ReplyDeleteGood post, i like it.
ReplyDeleteGreat share. I will be forwarding this along. Keep up the great work!
ReplyDeleteYes, I do use open source project. I agree with @Rodrigo Amaya some people get paid to developed other open source project. But as human being we work to live long in our planet to have shelter. But then using open source project is a best choice than the precious software in the market.mkotry
ReplyDelete