Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante that's the thing missing by almost all software. As example browser with inbuilt games or any other "easter eggs". Software be the software, not a chicken.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante So true!
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante Aren’t most Free Software projects done?
From time to time they are adapted to changes in the environment or otherwise changed expectations, but usually stuff just works.
Maybe a problem is that when we use grep or sed, we don’t realize that these are projects, too, because they don’t make the headlines.
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@tante Aren’t most Free Software projects done?
From time to time they are adapted to changes in the environment or otherwise changed expectations, but usually stuff just works.
Maybe a problem is that when we use grep or sed, we don’t realize that these are projects, too, because they don’t make the headlines.
@tante maybe a way to deal with that could be to write more often about the tools that already exist.
I remember how the university provided training all the time about citation management with Zotero, but there wasn’t a single training about bibtex.
Even though that is ingrained into many academic workflows and usually just works.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante@tldr.nettime.org corporate brainrot to break things that worked...
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante ANY software project that is never "done" was badly defined in the first place and suffers from scope creep.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante YES I am always saying this. Not everything needs indefinite maintenance, and certainly not periodic design refreshes that have become the ultra-frustrating norm.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante Opensource can uniquely do that I think. In the commercial world if you're not releasing a new version every few months customers start leaving, so there's huge pressure to add *something* even if it doesn't really make sense.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
Well, there is TeX (36 years without new features):
The design was frozen after version 3.0, no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes.Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features
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@tante And if people want more features, fork it!
Or, better, make it easy to add features without needing a fork. Provide clear and stable APIs and hooks for plugging in scripting languages.
No single program can capture 100% of all users' requirements. The goal for a Free Software project should always be:
- Implement the 90% of requirements that are common to most users.
- Make it easy for users to add the remaining 10% themselves.
- Make it easy for users who have the same 10%s to share their changes.
- Make it easy for users who have overlapping 10%s to share the common parts with other people, including overlapping sets of people.
Once you reach this point, you're done.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante Give me one good reason my travel planner shouldn't also be a social network, news outlet, large data processor, and a PS1 emulator running Blender. I'll wait.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante Not even an open source hot take. Just straight up a software hot take. And it shouldn't be hot, been trying to say the same for years.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante "Maintenance mode" is actually good because it stops devs from changing the damn UI every month just to have "kept the project alive"
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Or, better, make it easy to add features without needing a fork. Provide clear and stable APIs and hooks for plugging in scripting languages.
No single program can capture 100% of all users' requirements. The goal for a Free Software project should always be:
- Implement the 90% of requirements that are common to most users.
- Make it easy for users to add the remaining 10% themselves.
- Make it easy for users who have the same 10%s to share their changes.
- Make it easy for users who have overlapping 10%s to share the common parts with other people, including overlapping sets of people.
Once you reach this point, you're done.
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice
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@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante (in the end it was never implemented because neither me nor, as far as I know, anyone else, could stomach the dramatic expansion in scope. people just switch to FreeCAD if they need more features in practice, which in my experience at the time was infinitely worse)
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante If you don’t have investors breathing down your neck and demanding a high return on their investment, then yes, the product may well seem finished.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante I was archiving a load of CDs a while ago and noticed cdparanoia hadn't been updated since 2008. And why should it be? It's achieved its goal and does everything it set out to do. More things need to be like cdparanoia.
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@david_chisnall @webbop @tante (in the end it was never implemented because neither me nor, as far as I know, anyone else, could stomach the dramatic expansion in scope. people just switch to FreeCAD if they need more features in practice, which in my experience at the time was infinitely worse)
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante or in other words: there's a lot to be said for designing for extensibility, but it's an order of magnitude harder design, implementation, and support task, and so outright impossible for someone for whom the base application stretches their skill and experience to the limit
open interchange formats are still very hard in many of the same ways, but not quite as hellishly difficult
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@tante Give me one good reason my travel planner shouldn't also be a social network, news outlet, large data processor, and a PS1 emulator running Blender. I'll wait.
@munin *Claude Voice* You are making a very insightful point.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante we already can (and do) do this, not sure what the issue is or where the hot take is?
