Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*.
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@NohatCoder @leonid @tante the famous Donald Knuth projects, so bug free he personally offered bug-finder cheques that people framed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
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@tante I remember seeing people complaining on a Steam forum of a game about the game being "dead". It was a single player game and the developer replied that the game is simply done and finished and the reason it didn't get updates for years is that there are no known bugs to fix.
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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.
While I don’t disagree with the premise that software that delivers on its original purpose doesn’t need to be endlessly expanded, the reality is that all software lives within an ever-changing ecosystem.
Curl comes to mind as a tightly defined set of functionality that still requires constant work because of new protocols and the need for relentless optimisation.
I’ve seen a lot of software age like warm milk because people thought they could just deploy and forget about it.
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@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.
@benofbrown @tante in an ideal world. but 3rd party libraries change, vulnerabilities are discovered, system APIs change, GUI libraries change. Making old software build on modern systems can be very challenging and a lot more work than people think.
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@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.
The mantra of the last 25+ years has been that desktop computing is easy and ubiquitous and all programs should be easy.
Because they are easy, they do not require manuals or good documentation and most importantly, do not require training and education.
The reality is that every field of endeavor is complex and messy and has lots of stuff to learn. Management gravitates to "it looks easier, so it must work better" and this is almost always incorrect.
Meanwhile, many people have adopted the idea that they "aren't good at computers" when in reality they have never been taught and don't even realize what there is to learn.
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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 fewer apps, more utils, please
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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 When I was a more active participant in the erlang ecosystem, that was one of the nice things about it -- there are some old, good libraries which haven't been touched in years, because they're finished. And people in the community were ready to defend those libraries and that position when anyone expressed reservations about using them because they were old.
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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 This is also something for users to take note of. How many 'bug reports' I did not get asking if the project is still alive, or people discrediting software as 'unmaintained' only because the latest release is 1,5y old. There were no new things to fix.
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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 can't imagine ever being done with software I actually use in day-to-day life. I will always spot something that can be better or smoother or some additional functionality that would make it more useful. (This is, of course, a big "if" - talking about software "for me".)
In software in the public/open source/product sphere, I imagine there will always be feature requests from the userbase as well. If something comes in that is worthwhile (and truly additive to the value of the software)... why ignore it?
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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've been thinking about this a lot with a particular client. They keep building out new features, and while they're not bad features, I'm not sure it's actually helping the product.
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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 this essentially applies to all sorts of things. Not everything always needs to be constantly in search of more.
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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 wish corporations would realize this also!
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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.
THANK YOU!Drupal should have stopped at 7… maybe 9 and then forked to whatever it is now. they're two completely different products and i’ve resented it ever since. Backdrop (the fork from D7-8) is great, but it doesn't get the money and support Drupal gets.
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@tante ANY software project that is never "done" was badly defined in the first place and suffers from scope creep.
@marshalla99 @tante oof! SAY THAT!
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@tante "Maintenance mode" is actually good because it stops devs from changing the damn UI every month just to have "kept the project alive"
@howtophil @blogdiva @tante I believe the reason devs/companies make unwanted, unnecessary changes to software and services all the time is to justify charging a subscription fee for those things instead of letting you pay one time to own a copy, like in the old days. The move to subscription billing has created this perverse incentive.
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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@infosec.exchange @webbop@tech.lgbt @tante@tldr.nettime.org the problem here is, most projects are not designed as an Open Source project, but as a problem to be solved for the one person, which in turn maybe gets published and used for other things.
Adding a plugin system or API afterwards is such a big and annoying hassle. So I disagree, that everything should get an plugin system or API after the program is done, because that is (again) a new feature.
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The mantra of the last 25+ years has been that desktop computing is easy and ubiquitous and all programs should be easy.
Because they are easy, they do not require manuals or good documentation and most importantly, do not require training and education.
The reality is that every field of endeavor is complex and messy and has lots of stuff to learn. Management gravitates to "it looks easier, so it must work better" and this is almost always incorrect.
Meanwhile, many people have adopted the idea that they "aren't good at computers" when in reality they have never been taught and don't even realize what there is to learn.
@dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante It’s possible (but difficult) to design software to be intuitive and easy to use. It’s easier to write good documentation but nobody wants to do it. This is why so many projects give the documentation work to AI now even though it’s not very good. They kind of understand that they are supposed to have documentation but don’t want to do it and don’t *really* understand what the purpose/goal of documentation is.
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@dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante It’s possible (but difficult) to design software to be intuitive and easy to use. It’s easier to write good documentation but nobody wants to do it. This is why so many projects give the documentation work to AI now even though it’s not very good. They kind of understand that they are supposed to have documentation but don’t want to do it and don’t *really* understand what the purpose/goal of documentation is.
@MisuseCase @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante
The only thing worse than no documentation is stale documentation.
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@MisuseCase @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante
The only thing worse than no documentation is stale documentation.
@paninid stale documentation is still better than blatantly wrong documentation that looks correct on the outside but teaches concepts wrong.
I tried letting an LLM summarize a programming book I wrote. It looked surprisingly good, until it was just plain wrong.
@MisuseCase @dashdsrdash @tante -
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 still copy pasting script written in BASH in the early 1990ies...
