I constantly revisit the thoughts on purchased products vs open source products and how they work in the business world.  I like Open Source Software because it is a great resource to learn from, but have noticed that there are applications that are really good with few developers.  That alone causes a support issue when something breaks.

Purchased Software

Usually with purchased software you buy the product and expect, and usually get, reasonable timely support when something goes wrong.  If it is from a small ISV usually you get better support and if it is a bug they tend to get an update for the bug fix out relatively quickly.  Since employees there are paid to work on the product there is constant forward movement, usually, on iteratively released software.  Generally you know what to expect with most companies especially when purchasing from a reputable company.

Open Source Software

With OSS you generally get a good product, but with one caveat.  You never know what support is going to be like.  I have used several OSS pieces of software and on a few have extremely awesomely cool support.  Most it is generally mediocre at best if you can get the main devs to even listen to the problem you have.

Then you have the projects that make me hate OSS people where the support is so horrid you don't want to even try to use it even though it is the only option.  Basically, if you have a problem you get an RTFM, learn what you are doing newb, or write something up on it so others can learn.  None of these actually solve the problem at hand and just lead to really piss me off.  And updates from these proejcts are usually a "I'm not paid to do this so you get it when you get it" type attitude.  To me this is bad for the OSS community and why I stay away from a lot of OSS products when considering something for the business world.

The Communities

Behind good products are usually good communities that offer support to others, this is good.  However, community support should be backed up by a good core support team whether it be the company/dev team from a purchased product or the dev team of the OSS project.  If there isn't either than you can run into bad attitudes and problems.

I find that people don't mind purchasing software because they can get good support from either the company and/or a great community, but they will not use OSS software because they can't be guaranteed what type of support they will get.

Utopia vs Life

I have noticed an increasing number of people lately who get into the "OSS for all" type attitude and that proprietary software is evil.  While I can understand where they come from this is a dangerous line of thought because it leads to people with bad attitudes towards feature requests or questions on updates and direction of a project.

On a few projects I have seen people ask if a feature will be implemented and a usual response is "write-it yourself".  Yes, this would be wonderful if people would or even could  do that on their own.  Or they ask what direction a product is going because they are interested in it; then when they find out it doesn't go the way they want it to they ask why not do this.  This sometimes leads to a "You can branch it and take it that way, but we aren't going to bother".  Point being is they were just curios and they got stuck with a "piss off" response.

Conclusion

Basically, what I am getting at is with purchased software most people understand what they are getting into, and don't question it because it has always been this way.  However, with the recent push for OSS the last few years to break into the corporate world it is leading to a lot of animosity between business people and OSS dev's.  Honestly, some OSS people need to pull their head out of their asses and realize that OSS isn't a utopia they think it is and isn't going to be.  Business people need to shut the fuck up and realize that you are in a different time when it comes to software, and just because you aren't paying for it doesn't mean it isn't a good product.

If we can get OSS people to be more reasonable about development and business people to be more patient when dealing with OSS products things could go a lot further and cool things could happen.  We could even get some great "synergy". ;)

 

p.s. this was a stream of thought post that has been brewing in my mind for the last few months.  Please, leave comments on this if you want.

I have been poking around the social media space the last few days and have decided to give Del.icio.us a try again, but was curios what their API was like. As soon as I saw that it was all http posts my thoughts went to “NEVERMIND”. Then I thought “hey I wonder if someone has already made a .NET library for Del.icio.us.” Well someone has. I spent probably 5 minutes testing it too, and adding a link is as simple as the following code.

 

Of course so you don’t have to type out NDelicious you can use a using or import statement for the NDelicious namespace.

That is easy code and it works. Is honestly the first time I have used a 3rd party library and it works like it is supposed to.

.NET Del.icio.us library

One thing I frequently run into when coding and reading code is the lack of comments in code and documentation for code, especially in the OSS (open source software) community. As a “beginnermediate” developer I often look to quality code for how I should code, but am frequently disappointed when I see little to no comments and documentation. This is especially frustrating when I want to use a new library or technology. From experience and what I would like to see more developers do I want to write more on documenting code.

As I see it there are 4 types of documentation that all code should have accompanying software.

   1. In code comments
   2. Generated documentation from code
   3. Tutorials
   4. Unit Tests

1) In code comments – comments that usually are short descriptive comments to explain 1 to 2 lines of code max

2) Generated documentation from code – In the .NET world this would be XML Comments which when you do a compile against the code you can extract out all of the xml comments for better documentation of what is going on in the code and view them in your browser. Usually XML Comments are descriptive informative comments about large chunks of code

3) Tutorials – One thing that is needed when creating libraries and programs are tutorials on how to use it. Usually well thought-out tutorials are best, but at least something to tell/show the user what and how to use your product is one of the best forms of documentation you can provide.

4) Unit Tests – As a person that works/talks with Test Driven Development people Unit Tests are a great form of documentation because if you use a good naming convention for your tests you can tell what the test is doing. Also it is a form of a tutorial in that you can see HOW to use pieces of code hopefully many different ways.

So, there is a basic overview of documentation types. I will expand on these with full length posts and addendums as time passes.

p.s. Remember just because I write for “newbs” doesn’t mean that experienced developers can learn
something from “newbs” as they often time forget the simple things.

Well I am using ubuntu and while there are a quite a few things that I am so annoyed with about it, I am finding it quite usable. There are several things that I have needed to do for life, business, and school, and I am able to accomplish all of them so far. I must say ubuntu is very nice for a comprhensive alternative to windows. It takes some work to figure out things to use alternativly compared to windows, but it is quite doable.

One thing I find quite instersing is I need to remote into a windows server 2003 machine well I didn’t want to boot up my laptop just to do that one thing so I did a little bit of searching and some asking around and found out about grdesktop. This is an amazing app. I was able to easily remote into Windows Server 2003 perfectly from a gui interface. I was very much impressed.

For the most part everything that I have needed to do I have been able to accomplish through a GUI which makes me very happy. The one problem though is you have to take a lot of time to find little programs that come default in windows. I currently don’t seem myself going back to windows on my desktop unless when I do get my 64bit computer I can’t do anything, but so far from everything I have seen there is plenty of support for 64bit.

Later I will post up what I use in linux that correlates to an app in windows. I know this is a bad thing to do because you shouldn’t look at Linux as a direct comparison to Windows since they are two completely different things, but what they hey why not.

Well I have been working pretty diligantly today on my mono presentation for next monday. I must say though if I pull this off by some miracle it will be awesome. I am really likeing what has come together. I will also have a nice treat for the people attending the presentation on the 30th from a new friend in Dallas Joseph Hill.

I have used several live distrobutions of linux in the past to play with mono the first one I used was monoppix. Well since it was a great resource that had video tutorials, woot, then I wanted to add it so I doubled checked the site the old fashion way I tried to go there. Well guess what it isn’t there anymore. Hmm, that stinks it was good, but I have good news I save a bunch of… I mean there is Mono-Live which is the official live cd for mono. Now I must say this thing is awesome. Every mono program works like a charm. Usually I have to tweak and play and massage things to work, but not on Mono-Live it just worked which impressed me.

So go check it out. Mono-Live.

That is pretty much it for now need to get back to work I have a lot to do hope to see anyone local reading this at the next meeting.

woohoo. I finally got monodevelop installed on my laptop in crux.

What a bear of a job. I spent a few days wondering why in the world it wouldn’t start. Then mircoulusly(sp ?) I tried to start it through console and it spit out that it needed MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME variable set to Mozilla installation directory. Well that sucked because I had not idea what program it was refereing to. Whether it meant a specific one or the whole freaking package.

So after a day of griping and complaining and google searches I finally decided to just download the 13 meg mozilla file and untar it. Well once I finally did that I set the envritonment variable like so:

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="path/to/mozilla/"

After that it worked. Now I need to figure out why it says Version .8 and not version .7. Oh, well at least I have it installed now and can play with it.

Until next time happy coding.

Right now open source has no chance of winning this big battle against proprietary software. may the flames begin.

Here are my thoughts on this.

Yes, open source is good and has a lot of potential, but when the average american person does not know what in the world it is then we have a problem. I bring this to you from a recent experience that I had in my computer concepts and applications class (don’t ask). Anyway they were talking about types of software. The teacher mentioned 5 types of software.

1) Business software that you buy premade
2) Custom software that is built specifically for an organization or company’s needs
3) Shareware
4) Freeware
5) Free domain software

She proceeded to explain each step, but when she talked about free domain software she said that it is completely free you can take the code and edit it free of charge, but I wouldn’t suggest using it because most of it isn’t that great. Immediatly bells went off in my head. I asked her if by Free Domain Software she meant Open Source. I swear at the words open source I got one of the blankest “what are you talking about?” faces.

I explained that open source was software that was built in a collaborative environment among people all over the internet and the code was completely free to everyone in accordance to the gnu general public lisence. After about a 5 minute explanation she said yes that is what I am refereing to.

Now I see a problem with this. If a teacher does not know what Open Source is and doesn’t teach it then how is the Open Source world going to live.

Absolutly no one in my class uses Firefox. Most have heard of it, but don’t see the need to use it. They are content with IE, I must say I am too especially since I use IE7. Anyway, I mentioned that openoffice was an option instead of word, powerpoint, and excel. I told them they can get it for free and it was comparable, for the basic day to day use, as Microsofts suite. I got a response back from all the people in my class that they would rather buy Microsoft Office then use something free because they feel that if it is free then it won’t be as good, or close, to something they buy, in most cases MS does make better software. But, on the big programs OSS is getting there.

I have also asked several people that use firefox who made it and most said something along the lines of. “Some company, I think mozilla.” Most people think that it comes from a company that makes it, yes mozilla has a corporation, but it is OSS and not many people realize that. This is a barrier that needs to be broken through before OSS can become even more mainstream.

Also, a while back I asked a business executive what they say to people that call up and preach OSS and linux etc… There response to them is “we are not interested”. When I aked why they said “because money doesn’t really matter. we have a lot better reliabilty with Windows since the software that we use was built for windows and everything operates on windows. There is no reason to even consider anything else. ” Needless to say i was blown away at this response because a lot of companies that switch say they do it for money reasons. My question is how many more are out there that don’t care about money. Windows works for them so they don’t care to switch.

Just some thoughts and observations to think about.