An open-source problem Too many scratches for too
Are we the world’s least efficient market? Imagine what would happen if we could all pull behind a few credible alternatives, rather than inventing 585 of them?
This problem is ingrained at Microsoft, which feels the need to brand everything, but it is in no way limited to them. A search on Sourceforge for “issue tracker” gives 585 results. Sifting through those to pick a winner is difficult.
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After writing my rebuke of Sidux, I came across an excellent post on a similar topic. Ryan Davis writes a cogent attack on software’s tendency to reinvent the wheel. I heartily recommend that you read it.
The proprietary world feels the need to rebuild everyone else’s software in order to create walled-garden ecosystems. Unfortunately, the open-source world builds even more variants of the same products, though for different reasons.
Nor is this limited to the vendor world. Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst recently argued that most of the world’s software is built by enterprises for their own use…and then wasted in silo’d environments, if the code is used at all.
It’s more fun to write new code than read old code, but this fun wears off. After a certain initial momentum creating your new tool, you will inevitably come to a realization “this is going to take me for-[expletive]-ever”. Unless your itch is particularly strong, you’ll probably quit, and the world will be cursed with a 586th buggy issue tracker. By writing a plugin, you can ride the new-code high usually from start to finish, since its a much smaller task.
While Ryan’s critique lingers on open-source software, it’s by no means limited to open source. In fact, the launch pad for his critique is a Microsoft project:
