Solo Technology

Found “The CVS Cop-Out and the Stranded User” via slashdot today. Opening paragraph sure sounds familiar to many of us, I bet.

One of my biggest pet peeves with open source software is what I call the CVS cop-out. It works like this: I criticize (accurately) some shortcoming of an open source application either in an article or in conversation, and someone responds with, “That’s not true! That feature was fixed in CVS four weeks ago!”

Or words to that effect. As if that makes the bug that I want to talk about a non-issue. As if it is inaccurate to discuss a bug in the shipping version of an app just because there’s a fix in beta, alpha, CVS, or patched on the developer’s mailing list. It is a developer-centric perspective, unhelpful to the user.

Amen brother. I know I’ve seen similar type responses more than once over the last 10 or 15 years.

The other response that I’ve seen way too many times is, “Well go ahead and code that up and submit it” usually followed up by some mutt tacking on a “we’re not interested in your ideas unless you submit some code first.” Well shit fellas, I have an idea for improving your product and now I need to go get acquainted with your platform and coding style/standards so I can submit my own damned idea that I was just flying out to see if it made sense or you liked it? Yeah, there’s the future… What a great way to ensure that only developers ever inject new ideas or suggestions into the product. There’s lots of smart folks in the world and they don’t all have compilers. (yeah, hard to believe!)

And no, I’m not saying this applies to all open source projects. But I bet some readers here have seen similar responses in the past.

[oh, and read that slashdot article just for the comments.  Listen to the developers squeal.  omg.]

Leave a Reply