[fedora-india] Moving Forward in Open Source

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:37 PM, "sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)"
<foss.mailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
> <http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/editorscolumn/techetete/2010/110010801.asp>

Empty article that complains about how people who spend all their free
time doing FOSS are not doing enough, since they're not building
documentation so that people will understand stuff without reading the
code. The article would have been more fun to read if he would have
talked about 'leveraging', 'synergy' and 'collaboration'.

You can never _really_ understand stuff without reading code.

> I think we are losing the value of Open Source. The core objective of
> Open Source has been to let people learn the internals of a software
> application with the help of source code, and improve it further so that
> everyone benefits.
>

A very limited view of what FOSS is. People do not write FOSS to
_just_ so that others can read and understand. It is one of the
by-products. The intention of writing stuff in most cases is the need
to have something working. The sharing is there because I hope that it
will improve it.

>
> Let's understand this with my favorite example-Anaconda installer for
> RedHat based Linux distros. Anaconda is a fantastic piece of software,
> but it lacks documentation. So to modify it, you have to be a reverse
> engineer, and not a software developer. Therefore, contributing to its
> further development is difficult.
>

A very wrong use of the word 'reverse engineering'. While it is a
little difficult to understand the layout of a program without its
documentation, it is a really poor excuse if someone puts that up as
the reason for not contributing to a project. Reverse engineering is
when you have to work with streams of binary information (code or
data) and try to make sense out of it.

The article is really quite pointless. It has only superficial
complaints; no real insight at all.


-- 
Siddhesh Poyarekar
http://siddhesh.in