> >
> Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
> nobody wants to do maintenance. -- Kurt Vonnegut
>
Fortunately not all developers are like this. There are a good number
of open source developers who are good at fixing bugs and being
responsible for their code.
Someone may think that being paid for development makes all the
difference, but in reality, there are enough longstanding bugs that
exist in commercial operating systems and applications to cast doubt on
that theory.
I think for a lot of serious programmers, their application is like
their baby. While they may like to see it grow into some big superstar,
they still want to take care of it, repair it when it has a boo boo and
make sure it can keep up with the other kids so it doesn't get picked
on. Of course take that with a grain of salt because I'm writing this
almost 5 years to the day since I last released a version of num-utils.
But there are people out there that do some things that defy all the
expectations that open source programmers aren't interested in doing the
hard business-important stuff. I think they don't get nearly as much
limelight as they should. For instance, the WINE developers. Here are
some people who spent almost 15 years trying to make Linux do what
seems impossible. For many years they slaved away writing code with
little reward until they have finally made something that still knocks
my socks off everytime I see it run something because I know what crazy
stuff its trying to do. Its miraculous!
--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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