The Other Side Podcast Network :  Our other shows

Crivins 123 – One Person Projects

CrivinsAs 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

Author: Kevie Macphail

Kevie is from the Outer Hebrides, in the north west of Scotland,UK. He started podcasting with TuxJam back in 2011 and followed this by co-hosting tech-themed, discussion show Crivins along with Gordon Sinclair. A full time Linux user, currently using Debian as his distro of choice, and a keen promoter of unknown artists/bands, especially those who release their music under a Creative Commons license, this led Kevie to starting the CCJam community podcast. Always keen to spread the word on Creative Commons music and open source projects, Kevie has appeared as a guest on the Bugcast, Hacker Public Radio, Music Manumit Podcast, Rathole Radio and TINT.

One thought on “Crivins 123 – One Person Projects”

  1. 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *