You might write a post believing that it would elicit a decent response in the way of comments only to find it languishing in a desert of non-responsiveness. Then there are the other “spur-of-the-moment” type posts you may not expect a visitor to even read let alone comment upon that suddenly have a crop of comments growing under them. These comments can happen all at once or over a period of several days. Some comments even take their sweet time in coming after having no comments at all the first few days but any way they come–it usually comes as a bit of surprise.

And my “spur-of-the-moment” post about open source software is a no exception.

I really didn’t expect much of a response to the above mentioned post if any at all simply because it was a spur of the moment type of thing and laced with my attitude at the time which, I admit, wasn’t very good at the given moment of writing.

With that said I will remind everyone who might grace this blog with their visits (I mean that sincerely by the way, it’s nice having folks drop by) that this is a personal blog, not a professional or even semi-professional one and my posts will flow with my moods as can be expected on any personal type journalistic effort.

Even so, what I originally posted wasn’t made up or simply posted as comment bait. My experience has shown that there are more than a few people out there who simply can’t grasp the concept of open source software nor the people who spend their time developing it and then (usually) giving it away.

Okay, with that out of the way…

So what a surprise it was when, after several days of the post just virtually lying there, the comments started to come in. And coming in at a steady rate no less. Not a flood of comments all at once as if I was Dugg or Stumbled but rather comments from interested folks who just decided to pay a visit to see what I was talking about. And majority of them appeared to be developers of open source software no less.

And such a variety of responses as well.

The comments have ranged from those who made honest attempts at explaining their desire/drive to develop open source software so that I might have a better understanding, to responses criticizing my apparent attitude on the subject and how it might be improved, all the way to a few that bordered on the precarious edge of being downright insulting.

And there was even one commenter who decided that neither I nor my attitude was worth a tinker’s damn and that I should obviously just die–badly. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t think I want to meet you. You’re probably not a very nice person. One might go so far as to wonder if your mommy never loved you, or ask how many bodies are hidden in your basement. Also, why are you blogging about this? Go away. Go away and die alone in a basement filled with rats.

I have to admit that one gave me a chuckle. Obviously this guy was having a worse day than I was when I wrote the original post. Perhaps he’d been banging his head against a recalcitrant bit of code that absolutely refused to do what it was supposed to do?

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s a bit of a reply to a few points made by those folks who thought my post was worth a comment or two:

• Surprising as it might be, I can more than understand relating the development of open source software as a type art form or just growing flowers for the heck of it. I agree, it’s an apt analogy. I spent more than two decades as a (damn good) sound engineer until  my hearing degraded to the point where I had to quit the industry (service-related injury caused progressive hearing loss—just so there’s no misunderstanding). In fact the person running the sound board, if they’re any good at all, are probably as misunderstood by some as open source software developers are. The board is their instrument, they just don’t stand on the stage or in the recording studio. Hell, I even grew long stemmed roses for a time. They were quite lovely.
• Contrary to some folks’ assumptions, I’m not brainwashed or money oriented in any way nor does the concept of “software should be free” frighten me at all. Sure, I’m what you might call, “every day practical”–you have to be, especially these days. But my world and head for that matter doesn’t revolve around money or the concept that “you always get what you pay for”.  The idea that “quality costs” as far as software is concerned has become less true than ever these days.
• Developing code for a big company (as in said code now belongs to the company, not the developer) as an example of fueling the drive to develop OSS is an excellent point. Thanks to all those who pointed that out.
• Sharing software that you developed for yourself in hopes that others might find it useful. Another fine point made and taken as such.
• Sticking it to Microsoft, Adobe and the other big boys? Saying that we don’t need them? Okay, I can buy that—so to speak. I’d expect it does something to promote innovation and change within these bad boys as well?
• And no, I’m not going to go away and die alone in a basement filled with rats. My basement doesn’t have any rats. The cats keep them away.

To be honest about it, I’ll probably never be able to wrap my head around programming and writing up code. This is probably for the same reason that I have extreme difficulty learning a different language other than my own and what is programming after all but learning a different language? Life’s much too short and I’m getting a bit too long in tooth to be banging my head against something my head has such a difficult time understanding. I’ll simply have to settle for finding problems, reporting bugs and participating in forums as I have all along.

And so there’s no mistake, I never said that I don’t appreciate the effort that these open source software developers put into their projects, I most certainly do. However, I’ve always been a bit of a cynic as well and that is bound to show up—especially on this blog.

Now I believe I’ll go check the basement for rats—just in case.

When it comes to home computers and the software that runs on them I’m not a developer I’m a user. A technically advanced user, yes but a user nonetheless. Same goes for software that runs in the so-called “Cloud”. It takes a certain mindset, a certain way of thinking to sit in front of a monitor and write line after line after line of code that I simply don’t have. Never could wrap my head around the concept of programming and I’m hardly alone in this respect.

Now this doesn’t mean I can’t track down a buggy piece of open source software to a certain line or lines of troublesome code–I can. What it means is I don’t have the knowledge nor the kind of experience (nor the inclination to get any) to be able correct the problem all by my lonesome.

So I head off to the appropriate forum and/or bug reporting site to find the answer or to report the problem in hopes that I will eventually find an answer. I have no problem making out a bug reports, participating in developer forums or helping out others who might be having a problem.

I’m fairly good at this and a whiz at Googling so I usually get along just fine.

So this is what I don’t understand: Why do the developers of Open Source Software even bother? I mean, what’s the point?

Simply put, open source software is software where the code that makes up that software (often called the “source”) is freely distributable. Anyone can download it, modify it to suit their needs, correct bugs, add features or even use it as a base to build their own version of the software. And there’s no cost associated with either using it or obtaining the source code.

The kicker is that the majority of developers of all this open source software do not get paid for their efforts ergo what’s the point?

Am I missing something here?

Take the current situation. I’m typing this post using TinyMCE which is a web based, javascript HTML/WYSIWYG editor–which is open source.

This TinyMCE editor is part of the WordPress install which runs my beloved old blog here. WordPress is open source.

I’m accessing all this using Mozilla’s Firefox–which is open source.

And all of this is taking place using the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop OS–which is also open source.

As I stated above, the majority of these developers (who range from all over the world) do not get paid. These folks are doing all this work, putting in their own time and effort to help build these programs and operating systems and they just give it all away at the end.

Every piece of software I mentioned above, relatively speaking, has only a handful or less of paid developers working behind the scenes on any one of these projects, say around 5 to 10 percent? That leaves around 90 to 95 percent of these developers, support people, testers, forum moderators, documentation writers, wiki maintainers and whoever else is contributing their time on any given project, working on a strictly voluntary basis.

And then they just give it all away? This is a business model? I’m amazed this stuff even exists let alone work as well as it does.

So what’s in it for all these non-paid individuals anyway?

Does it look good on their resumes? Does it give them a deep abiding sense of personal satisfaction? Does it help them in their chosen field? Do they do this just because it’s there? What?

Why am I able to sit here writing up this post using all this rather high quality free and open software that was developed by people who weren’t paid–that I didn’t have to pay for?

What’s the catch? Why does it even exist?

Perhaps I’m just too cynical but the world I live in there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The only thing I ever get without handing out a chunk of change is the junk mail I find in my mailbox every morning. And yet here I am munching happily away on a new post without having paid for anything except  hardware and hosting. And as far as the hardware’s concerned this computer I’m working on right now is 7 years old which, by today’s standards, makes it effectively worthless. Yet it’s fast, efficient, reliable and does everything I need it to do. And the operating system and all the software that’s running on it didn’t cost me a dime.

People developing quality software for no pay and then giving it away.

I just don’t get it.

For the Record is a Mozilla community program for discovering, cataloging, and responding to what’s being said about Mozilla online.

We also want to make it easier for people to talk/report/blog about Mozilla by providing a collection of answers to frequently asked questions and responses to common misconceptions or mistakes.

As we go forward, this program will also help develop spokespeople who will be able to deliver the Mozilla story more effectively and in more places.

Apparently one of the main reasons for this new blog about Mozilla and how things work there stems from the plethora of articles and posts written about the upcoming release of Firefox 3, some accurate, some not so accurate (my latest post about Firefox 3 beta 3 was one of the links in the second post at the site but whether I’m considered one of the more accurate ones or not remains to be seen).

In the second post called When it’s Ready, the title of which reflects Mozilla’s commendable policy of releasing milestones of their popular software such as Firefox only "when it’s ready" and not before, Asa asked Mike Beltzner, the head developer behind Firefox 3, to explain the philosophy behind how Mozilla actually runs it’s release schedule and adjustments thereof for purposes of getting the best quality possible into any given release:

The first and most important thing to state is that we, as a project, are quality driven, not date driven. We use dates to set targets for milestones, and we strive to put out the best milestones possible, but due to the changing nature of the web, we always judge each milestone against our basic criteria of quality, performance and usability. The other factor how we rely on community use and testing of our betas to help us judge their quality. Without our close-to-million strong beta audience, we couldn’t get the usage and testing data required to provide us with the confidence to move into a shippable product.

In the context of adding a fourth beta, the decision was between holding beta 3 for some new work being done on performance, usability, and memory use, versus shipping the beta sooner to get testing on the improvements (based on community feedback) from the past month and a half. We decided that the best thing for our beta audience would be to release beta 3 and add another milestone as opposed to holding for the late-braking improvement opportunities. Those will be the basis for our fourth beta.

We all want to ship the best browser possible on the fastest timescale, and we meet weekly to evaluate our current product against the potential improvements we could continue to make. When our quality, usability and performance are solid enough to be called Firefox 3 (as judged by everyone involved in making it) we’ll ship it.

So there you have it. Finally a place to go where one might find accurate and detailed info on how the minds at Mozilla work, pose any questions one might have and find out what’s happening with the software they’re working on so we, the blogger’s of the world, can spread the word far and wide and the word might just have a truer ring to it from now on. Not a bad idea at all if you ask me.

For those that already realize this please ignore the previous bold type, for the others, lighten up already.

This fact that the current results of any given search query in the new engine is basically going to be lousy is made quite obvious in the rather small blurb that’s Wikia Search’s “About” page as you can see by the excerpts below:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

And at the bottom there’s this…

This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search.

Looks pretty plain and simple to me. The rest of the blurb isn’t much longer so there was obviously no attempt to hide what this first offering actually was inside of a long, drawn out, multi-paragraph, say nothing “About” page as sometimes happens with other more finished offerings that are rather awful upon first release.

Sure there’s been a lot of hype about this new search engine but then again there’s a lot of hype about any new product that comes out and rarely does any new product live up to it’s hyped up image, at least not in my experience. It’s been that way for years now so who the heck pays attention to hype nowadays? For me it’s always been a “Show me the money” thing and with Wikia Search it’s going to have at least one year under it’s belt before I’ll pronounce judgement on it.

If it works it works and if it fails it fails. The idea of a search engine that combines the usual (or unusual) algorithms and user feedback appeals to me for some reason. Probably because I’ve never been all that comfortable with having a vast array of servers thinking it knows what I’m looking for. I also like the idea of this being open source but that’s me. Why shouldn’t we have a Firefox of search engines?

Don’t get me wrong here, I depend on Google and very often Live Search in my daily research and I probably always will but in the meantime I’ve already joined the Wikia Search Community (and I’m not exactly what you might call a “social animal”) and I’m going to work on that feedback they’re calling for. Wonder how many other folks will stop complaining and start offering their experience and knowledge in this latest search engine endeavor? Time will indeed tell.

Technorati Tags: Wlkia Search,Jimmy Wales,Open source

(time passes) Okay, maybe not.

And now, to make matters worse, Mozilla seems to be kicking all the loyal Thunderbird users right in the face by taking over the future open source development of the old and venerable Eudora email client and basing the new version on none other than future developments of Thunderbird?? What’s this crapola huh? They even launched a public beta of Eudora 8/Penelope. A whole new version of Eudora based on an email client that they no longer develop!?!

Oh-ho, methinks there are misdoings afoot so let us hypothesis here a bit about what I call my

Thunderbird, Eudora, Mozilla Conspiracy Theory

To wit…

Mozilla agrees to take on the future development of the Eudora email client under an open source license.  They decide to initially base it on their latest stable version of Thunderbird (2.0.0.6), start work on an extension called “Penelope” that plasters the Eudora UI all over poor Thunderbird and adds in a few Eudorian type features as well. They then kick this bastard child of an email client out the door calling it “Eudora 8 Beta 1″. It even works well as long as the Penelope extension is enabled and once they get past the fairly poor Eudora eye candy, current Thunderbird users should feel right at home. After all, for all intents and purposes it’s still good old Thunderbird with a few extra features tacked on.

At the same time Mozilla, knowing full well that it would look mighty foolish if they put significant effort, money and resources into two different versions of the same email client, kicks the Thunderbird name out the door, throws 3 million bucks at the now out of work developers calling it “seed money” and continues to develop the Thunderbird code base under the new name of Eudora/Penelope project. And they even have the help of the original Eudora developers for about a year or so to help them along. In other words straighten out the mess that has been the Thunderbird code base into something more efficient and streamlined. In the meantime, the original two developers of Thunderbird quit Mozilla and head off into an undisclosed project of their own. My own uneducated conspiratorial guess is that this undisclosed project is the development of all the “extra features” that Thunderbird users have been clamoring for over the last couple of years but instead, developing these new features for the open source version of Eudora.

Okay, the last bit was a pretty far fetched but with alternatives like Outlook, Outlook Express or the new Windows Live Mail Desktop (Outlook Express with a set of new clothes), to look forward to I think I’ll place my bets with the new Eudora rather than poor old Thunderbird. In fact, I happen to be running both right now on my main PC and since I use the same Thunderbird profile for both programs, I don’t have to even have to worry about importing my Thunderbird email into Eudora 8 B1.

Kinda’ funny how it works out that way isn’t it?

The Eudora 8/ Penelope version of Thunderbird even adds something that’s been missing form Thunderbird that I really missed. A working “previous” and “next” message button added to the toolbar in an open message window like old Outlook Express always had.

So that’s my theory for whatever it’s worth. I think it’s rather clever to say so myself. I wonder if any of you care to have a go at it?