"Dogpiling" on the OpenSource Community

Matt Assay recently posted an article that casts a somewhat negative view on the 'OpenSource" community at large.

What most commenters and writers of response articles are taking from it is that Matt and those who think like him consider the largest portion of users and 'members' of a given 'community to be 'freeloaders".

Here at PBP, we ( I say "we" because, believe it or don't, there is more than one person working on some of these articles ) believe that many people labor under the wrong impression of what "Open" as in "OpenSource" is all about. Especially in regard to communities that build around OpenSource software.

If anyone honestly believes that by opening a forum or wiki, blog, etc.. that allows people to join and 'contribute' in the hopes that numerous talented and excited programmers, testers, and other experienced persons will dive right in and make that "community' an OpenSource powerhouse, they are mistaken.

Building an 'OpenSource' community should be looked at as similar to mining. You will find a lot of people who will download and use the software, etc and not produce any real response in the form of contributed code or testing results, etc...

What you will find is maybe one out of 50 users who are even capable of writing code. Why is it just assumed that all people who might use OpenSource software are just going to know that kind of stuff anyway? Are people still so in the dark as to think only IT pros are using Linux anymore? Read the forums at ANY Linux distro and you will discover that the vast majority of posters have no coding or technical skills really. They are simply people who want to use a computer.

Not only are they not going to provide code or specific testing results, they most likely won't post a word unless they find something not working. In this regard, silence gives consent. We hope.

They just want to write a report, or listen to music or watch a movie, etc.. They want to use the software, not help design it.

Those 'users' can still be useful though. As one commenter said in the Matt Assay article, if nothing else, they can be used as a gauge to how often the software is being downloaded, the few user related comments can give an idea, a direction on how it is being used.

When the honest-to-goodness coder or aspiring coder pops in and decides to offer something, you should look on that as a positive. Your software has been found interesting and useful enough to incite someone to want to help improve it. Take that contribution and run with it. If it is indeed useful and does indeed make things better.

Like I said, it's like mining or panning for gold. You will more often than not get a lot of silt and dust and other non gold or diamond gems. However, the experienced treasure hunter learns to use those things to help them find out if they are in the right area to begin with.

All of the users are useful if they are viewed properly.