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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

Because I see every piece of software like this as something I will inevitably have to dig deep into the internals of to fix bugs and send patches for if I were to adopt it. So should you.

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By being so religious about the open source aspect only, you are blind to the many potential other benefits a project may have. But to each their own.

I don't think that's true. I've long worked with software both proprietary and not, and I find myself digging deep all the time. I shouldn't have to reverse engineer my dependencies to find out why they're broken. When I do figure it out, I should be able to send a patch so everyone benefits. Without these basic things in place, I simply cannot get work done.

The other advantages are not really important. If an open source offering is lacking something, I can just add it myself. If the proprietary version is lacking something, I cannot.

And what if what you're doing is just a quick, one month project? Is it likely you must absolutely dig into the sources then? I would say no. The fact is, your original comment completely fails to address or take into account the context of the individual project. You think you're being reasonable, and of course there are great advantages to open source. I too would prefer this library to be. But the dogmatism and fanaticism is not just offensive to the author who claims elsewhere in the thread that he spent 4 years on this, it's also irrational and leads to suboptimal results.

>And what if what you're doing is just a quick, one month project? Is it likely you must absolutely dig into the sources then? I would say no.

You would be surprised. I can't even count on one hand the number of times I've send a patch upstream within the first 2 hours of using a new dependency.

I don't really care how long he spent on it. It was a waste of 4 years if it's just going to be proprietary.

> It was a waste of 4 years if it's just going to be proprietary.

Dogmatism all over again.

Sir_Cmpwn, i too find myself sending drive-by patches after trying out a new package.

Don't bother with this hateful guy, you rock!

Wanting to debug/maintain libraries you depend on isn't what I would call "religious".

> you are blind to the many potential other benefits a project may have

What makes you think we aren't paying attention?

Because the comment

> This is proprietary, so it's a non-starter.

did not go into _any_ of the other details or aspects of the project.

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