How everyone wins with open source software
Monday, May 26th, 2008
by DoubleB
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by Lisa Hoover,
Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app’s developers mentioned in the article’s comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.
To get a better understanding of why I’m so impressed by the responsiveness of open source developers, consider the user’s point of view. Say I decide one day that I want to index my entire collection of CDs. I tell my friend Jack and he decides to do the same thing. Since I’m using Linux, I download CDcollect and get to work. Jack, on the other hand, doesn’t use Linux and coughs up $19.95 for similar commercial software that will run on his computer. The next day we meet for lunch and discuss how great it would be if we could search for music by track length, but unfortunately neither of our applications has that feature. I go home, email the project’s developer with the suggestion, and receive a reply the next day saying he’ll add that to the list of enhancements in the next version, due out in a couple weeks. Jack emails tech support at the company where he purchased his software to request the feature in a future upgrade, but they can only help troubleshoot installation issues.
Read the rest of this article at Linux.com.
