Open Source
I always thought a certain portion of population had a repressed desire to write a book. Perhaps not to become fantastically wealthy but to be recognized for the ability to present compelling ideas to others and possibly influence them.
Is this why I [mo]blog? Maybe. Frankly only having 4 semi-regular readers makes this a futile path to fame. Sadly even my wife doesn’t bother to read this. But this quest for creative contribution is partially the reason I became a programmer. It is an occupation with different, relatively creative challenges every day. And someday if my software ever gets sold to someone, it’ll stroke my ego.
The stuff I do takes advantage of open source software like Linux. Developers, who usually go uncompensated for it, contribute source code for others to use free of charge. I have written open source software as well. Aside from code I wrote that was purposely
bad and college students wanting me to write their Huffman Algorithm homework for them, my open source code goes largely unnoticed.
Two of the (many)open source programs I use at work are XML-RPC and thttpd. I mention those particular two because I happen to find a bug in each of them. Minor corner cases most people wouldn’t encounter, but since I could look at the source I was able to fix them myself. Now as a good steward of open source software, I notified the original authors so others can take advantage of my fixes. I posted my changes on their mailing lists too. Since they don’t know me from Adam, the code owners would have to be willing to review and merge my changes into the authority copy. I was hoping to be able to say I was a open source contributor.
So I waited for my patches to be picked up and incorporated into the main source branches. And I waited some more.
After posting my thttpd fix, the merits of my fix were debated. Some thought the problem should never arise. One person even argued that the program SHOULD crash when the rare situation does occur. I mentioned that he should warn me if he ever writes software for the medical or airline industries.
My XML-RPC fix was ignored as well. It was more than a few line fix, so a person would have to spend a few minutes reading it to understand it. No one bothered. Months later someone reported on the mailing list the same problem I had had. He was kind enough to post a simpler fix which, unfortunately, had no chance of compiling let alone solving the problem. After I remind everyone that I had already solved the problem the code owner did take notice and incorporated my changes. Yippee! I’m famous in a very, very, very small way.