Writing software you need
Open Source projects with good intentions can often be left abandoned. While there are many explanations one of them is “Maybe the author did not need the software” ! Jamis talks about his confessions in regards to writing software that you need.
This got me thinking, maybe it’s about Eating your own dogfood .. like DokuWiki. DokuWiki is a great wiki, but Andreas Gohr actually uses it on his own site. Ruby on Rails uses Instiki Wiki and Hieraki, A online book system, both of these built on top of Rails. And then some more examples:
- Kwiki uses Kwiki
- Wordpress uses Wordpress.
- Wikipedia uses Mediawiki.
- Firefox is probably used by the people who write it, because they want a better browser.
- And the list goes on …
Some applications I am sure will only be used within organisations, still published, yet the need for the software in regular use will exist.
Would somone maintain software if they didn’t use it ? Possibly not.
Would they find bugs if they didn’t use it ? Probably not by themselves. Other people might find issues, but there is less motivation to fix other peoples bug when you’ve got other things to do.
This make’s sense .. If something is useful to you, its probably useful to other people. If it’s bugging you, you’ll probably fix it. So the more features you need and implement, the more others may benefit.
More importantly, if you use the software you will maintain it. It won’t be some stagnant site that is never killed even though they only released a barely functional alpha version.