by Saurabh
30. July 2006 17:31
OSS is; at worst - ridiculously pathetic and can be the brilliant underdog - at best. But most of the times it's plain frustrating to work with… in my humble opinion, that is. I have worked most of my career on it, I have had many frustrating experiences with it. How the hell can you explain to yourself; let alone your peers & superiors how a FC4 server would reboot whenever you make a request to phpMyAdmin that's been working great for the past 4 months. This kind of voodoo behavior has driven me nuts at times.
Ironically I'm talking on this issue on the day I was finally successful in setting up CVS after almost a dozen attempts over the last few months. (Had earlier tried it on Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora Core 4, FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 & Windows xp Professional over the course of time, when I was finally able to setup CVSNT on my Windows xp machine)
Then there are things that you can't stop laughing about; thinking how pathetic a situation can get. So Jani Taskinen, one of the lead developers of the PHP project had quit. There are people who are using this incident to cite the supposedly "unhappy" life that OSS programmers lead. I absolutely hope that it's not true. As soon as you begin to wonder what was of so much interest to Slahdotters in this story when you suddenly find discussions about the Israel & Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon having something to do with this? Grow up people!
And then there's the whole debate over the GPL draft. Let's face it, GPL is not a business-centric model. But then why debate over the commercial viabilities every time a new draft is forged?