Give back to the community (please?)
Last week, I was ticked off by the behavior of a colleague: he complained the duplicated code panel in Sonar was not explicite enough. When I remarked he could give feedback to the Sonar team, he replied he had other things to do!
As for me, I use OpenSource projects since a while back: Struts was my first, but now there are the whole Apache frameworks (Log4J, CXF and Commons just to name a few), Spring, Hibernate, Vaadin of course but also tools like Maven, Hudson/Jenkins, Sonar and the list goes on! All these projects are not only open sourced, they are free – as a beer! Even better, all of them have detailled documentation and a user base that equivalent commercial products sometimes lack.
Of course, companies publishing these frameworks aren’t there for the glory, they have to earn money. And yet, I can use them “as-is” and have the framework behave just like for a regular enteprise paying user. I don’t think there are many industries in the world where the production bricks are available at no cost as is the case in the software industries.
However, using these frameworks/tools without paying is a one-way deal. Yet, we can provide editors with a much valued thing: feedback. Commercial editors use time and money to conduct surveys that will direct their development effort. But just as we are provided with free products, we can provide OpenSource software editors with a costly resource, our own opinion.
That’s why it’s very important to take only 10 minutes to fill an issue or an enhancement request. Besides, it will benefit all of us in the next product version. So please provide your favorite editor with feedback!
Note: since the initial complaint was not fully unjustified, I’ve filled a Jira describing the request
From http://blog.frankel.ch/give-back-to-the-community-please
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Sivaprasadreddy... replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 12:49am
Hi Nicolas,
I strongly agree with you on this.
Dear Developers,
Just imagine how much burden these open source frameworks are reducing from us.
If we don't have Struts how much painful it is to write the logic again n again to parse request and populate form beans, validations etc. How painful it is to write the same boilerplate jdbc code if we dont have Hibernate.
And all this is we are getting for free. So we should give feedback and contribute back to the community.
Thanks,
Siva
Mladen Girazovski replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 3:44am
@sivaprasad >> If we don't have Struts how much painful it is to write the logic again n again to parse request and populate form beans, validations
I think you meant "if we didn't had struts 8-9 years ago...", or is there still people seriously considering struts for greenfield projects? I find this very hard to believe...
Sivaprasadreddy... replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 6:49am
in response to:
Mladen Girazovski
Hi,
Unfortunately in India still we are working on projects(maintenance/enhancements mode) developed using Struts 1.x. :-(. Recently things are getting better.. getting projects using Spring, RIA frameworks.
Grails, Scala etc are hot technologies using by many people in USA... But hardly you can find the companies using Grails, Scala in India(Atleast i haven't met anyone working on Grails, Scala).
Thanks,
Siva
Mladen Girazovski replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 7:36am
Raw ThinkTank replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 9:55am
Reza Rahman replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 10:32am
in response to:
Sivaprasadreddy Katamreddy
OSS is definitely an important way to contribute to the community, but it is far from the only way. In the Java world, it is very possible/valuable to contribute to standards bodies like the JCP as independents.
Should anyone be interested in doing so, this post is a good starting point: http://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/javaee_7_transparency_jsrs_as. Just as in an OSS project, your contribution could be as simple as entering a JIRA issue or observing an alias.
Anonymous Coward replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 11:06am
Andy Jefferson replied on Tue, 2011/07/12 - 2:27pm
in response to:
Anonymous Coward