It's all about the people

So you want to complain about that damn piece of (open source) software? The problem is, complaining does not make it better, it just let's you feel better for the moment. No single problem is solved by yelling at the code.

All these issues, wishes and problems are not the real point here. It's not really about the obvious things (they could be much better tracked elsewhere), the real crux lies at a very different place.

You state that you "better could write your own $thing" - indeed that's what other people already did. Quite a number of projects started as clones of existing ones, built on top of the experiences gained from other projects. In that sense, each OSS project is only one example of a greater picture, it is how Open Source software in general lives, grows and evolves. Each project lives and dies with the people involved and committed to it. Software in general, and OSS in particular is never perfect, it is never finished and there is always something to improve, some bug to fix or something to re-design. Even Donald Knuth had to pay a few checks.

And yes, in some cases people start forks or re-implement from scratch with the intention to do things better than all of their predecessors - and sometimes that's what they really do. Subversion raised that way, and so did Git. But there is also that huge heap of unfinished and abandoned projects around ... a good portion of these suffered from the "mee too" syndrome and the "not invented here" syndrome, and eventually died from plain and simple lack of interest. Whoever started either one of these, it for sure was not with the intention to leave it that way.

Despite that, some of these projects are really successful, people start to like it and use it big time in productive environments for all kinds of things. So got Linux traction, and so did a plethora of other OSS tools and products. But behind all that technology stacked together, at the very bottom of it, there's still that tiny piece of code where it once started. It all goes back to that small, proof-of-concept-alike module, which suddenly came to life, and, after growing and nurturing it, finally did what the inventors had imagined. It was far from perfect, it was even a bit ugly, and there was no documentation and no web site, but it worked like hell and some people saw the potential in it. Some of them joined you and spent their own time to improve it, to document it, to even write books about it. They let the community grew by spreading the word about that awesome cool and powerful tool they just discovered.

Of course, when people come together to work at things, they all have different backgrounds and priorities, and look for sometimes very different things. Because of this, things almost never smootly without discussions, sometimes vehement ones. This is completely normal and it's called "life". A few of these things that you mentioned are indeed in our focus, and of course there are some more things on our lists that we plan to do, sooner or later.

The cornerstone of not only Open Source, but basically any project, is contributions made by people: If there are enough people to just start doing the things they feel the need for, or see the genius way to make things better than before, awesome things start to grow.

The only thing needed is very simple, and at the same time very hard. It is the minute where the magic happens, where someone, somewhere decides to just start doing something. It does not have to be the big cool new uber-feature. A lot of the things to do are indeed quite small things, such as better documentation, writing tutorials, fixing some small bugs, ensuring better quality, etc. These tasks are very important, even if some of them may be quite a bit boring. Nevertheless, implementing them will let the product shine.

At the end, it all rises and falls with people that believe enough in the project to spend a part of their life to it. We need you users and developers who are reading this. We need even you, yes you, who already has an awesome patch in his repo and just hesitates to contribute, because you think your code will not be good enough. Believe me, it is good enough - and if there are really flaws in it, we will be glad to help you improving it and make it great.

And that is what OSS is all about: Building really great things out of imperfect pieces.

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