On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:37 PM, "sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)" foss.mailinglists@gmail.com wrote:
http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/editorscolumn/techetete/2010/110010801.asp
Empty article that complains about how people who spend all their free time doing FOSS are not doing enough, since they're not building documentation so that people will understand stuff without reading the code. The article would have been more fun to read if he would have talked about 'leveraging', 'synergy' and 'collaboration'.
You can never _really_ understand stuff without reading code.
I think we are losing the value of Open Source. The core objective of Open Source has been to let people learn the internals of a software application with the help of source code, and improve it further so that everyone benefits.
A very limited view of what FOSS is. People do not write FOSS to _just_ so that others can read and understand. It is one of the by-products. The intention of writing stuff in most cases is the need to have something working. The sharing is there because I hope that it will improve it.
Let's understand this with my favorite example-Anaconda installer for RedHat based Linux distros. Anaconda is a fantastic piece of software, but it lacks documentation. So to modify it, you have to be a reverse engineer, and not a software developer. Therefore, contributing to its further development is difficult.
A very wrong use of the word 'reverse engineering'. While it is a little difficult to understand the layout of a program without its documentation, it is a really poor excuse if someone puts that up as the reason for not contributing to a project. Reverse engineering is when you have to work with streams of binary information (code or data) and try to make sense out of it.
The article is really quite pointless. It has only superficial complaints; no real insight at all.