Work and open source

This blog post will be a small recap of the work day. After a few day break I resumed my work on Datazenit. I was occupied with other things and few conceptual projects for the past couple of days, but more on that later.

I was unpleasantly surprised when I updated the project’s bower packages and one of them broke some fundamental things about how Datazenit works. I spent most of the day fixing several new bugs, but after an intensive fight the victory was declared. I had a dilemma to switch the broken package to a new one, but decided to go the pragmatic route and just repair the existing one. It always feels pretty useless to work against a dependecy, because it should ease your job not the other way around.

Open source libraries should be chosen carefully not only for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the high abandonment rate. I have experienced at first hand how many great projects get forgotten and lose any maintenance. It would be nice if everyone threw a few bucks towards an open source project they use, but it rarely works because:

• There is often no way to do it. Gittip is nowhere near as popular as it should be.
• Few bucks doesn’t change anything because you are the only one donating.
• Projects don’t always get abandoned because of financial issues.

Maybe Github should allow some kind of monetization for projects. Take for an example YouTube – everyone can earn by creating and uploading a video. Why can’t open source developers do the same in a similar fashion?

Just not the ads, please.