As Philip Newborough, better known as @corenominal online, calls time on his popular Debian based distro Crunchbang, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using smaller projects.
Tune
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Rants and ramblings (with a bit of FOSS thrown in for good measure)
As Philip Newborough, better known as @corenominal online, calls time on his popular Debian based distro Crunchbang, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using smaller projects.
Tune
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Thanks for the thoughtful comments on the strengths and weaknesses of one-person projects.
I wanted to add a small coda to the part of the discussion relating to possible corporate use of software produced by a one-person project in the face of near-certain lack of support.
In my previous incarnation as an employed person, we used a somewhat obscure open source relational database server (Firebird) in a critical role. While there might have been support for that code, we never needed it, so I never found out. On top of that, we needed an api to allow our Python code interact with the server. That api project (kinterbas) was a real one-man show, and about halfway through the lifespan of our database project, he stopped maintaining kinterbas.
Apparently there was sufficient demand in the Firebird community for Python access, because someone else stepped up and started a replacement project.
I really don’t know the particulars, but my impression is that the replacement project was started from scratch, not depending on the existing code base. Both Firebird and Python had progressed to versions that were no longer compatible with the last version of kinterbas.
Anyway, we never needed support. Despite my crack about employment above, it didn’t get me fired. But we were a small company and given the alternatives available we were willing to take the risk. Although it is more likely a comment on our level of professionalism, I thought I’d let you know that folks will put themselves in the position of relying on projects with no visible means of support.