Why open source? And how to get real participation?

Question

Possible duplicates:
The best way to find open source project partners for non-software tasks
Open Source Arguments

For me, the main goal of open sourcing is collaboration. If most other developers are going to do this, take it and use it and let me know about the errors, then I could also close it. Closed source gives me all this.

I recently watched a small javascript library (or more like a plugin, 1000 lines of code), which are actually quite popular. There were some errors in it, because new versions of browsers are released every day, and as a result, these errors appear. I was worried that these errors are actually quite easy to fix even by the average javascript developers, but for a month no one began to fix the error and send the corrected version. The original author was obviously busy this month, but what is the point of open searching for your code: so that others can use it and help themselves AND the project, if they can.

Thus, it makes me doubt the promise of open source. If people are also not working on this, I could also close my original new projects. And how do you attract people to discover a source?

Edit For those who wondered why I myself did not fix this. I did not do this because I am not even an intermediate javascript developer. One remote blog suggested a possible fix, but how can I use this fix in my code? You might think that the author of this remote blog (instead of doing it on your own blog to get street credit), take it one step further and actually correct the correction in the code as much as possible so that it becomes useful to others, His decision on an unrelated blog did not help me. It had to be brought to an end, since open source allows him to do this. Basically he says: “I have” a solution. Why not bake it already?

Answer 1

The vast majority of open source projects are likely to receive little if any representations of the code for a number of reasons, including:

• the project is frankly not very good
• the code is tight.
• the project addresses a small specialized field
• the intersection of many users and a set of possible programmers is small.

The latter, of course, refers to one of my own FOSS projects http://code.google.com/p/csvfix (others can also be used, of course), which is a tool for exchanging data with CSV data files written in C ++ . Most likely, the number of C ++ programmers who want to do this is small, so I did not expect that they would be fixed and fixed, and there were none. However, I received a number of bug reports and improvements that I included, where possible, in the product improvement.

But just because most CSV violinists are not C ++ programmers does not mean that the project was not supposed to be open source. People reported about the imminent and compilation of code on platforms that I do not have access to (it is impossible for a closed source), and if I get out of the perch tomorrow, someone else will be able to pick it up in the future.

Answer 2

Open source should be the default, not the other way around. What are the benefits of using your project directly?

At the very least, an open-sourcing project gives other people the opportunity to adapt, change or fix it - and learn from it. Source retention holds all these possibilities.

Answer 3

Open Source is not going to force other people to whitewash fences for you. Regardless of whether you believe in “no ego, novice mind” with regard to programming, you need to approach an open search for your projects this way. You might think that your project is best ever, but until it is useful to someone else, no one should contribute to it.

For me, an open-sourcing project has several advantages over other people who correct your mistakes.

• The likelihood that someone can pick up my bad embryo of an idea and just good code and see a better idea in it and help me turn it into a better thing.
• If my project is useful to someone, if a bus hits me tomorrow, they can still use it and expand it without me.

Answer 4

The chances that someone will correct it if you do not release the source are very close to zero. However, if you open source, this is at least more. And as the red-unicorn said, if you really do not benefit from a nearby source, you will suffer from it.