Finish Your Stuff (2015)

You'd be surprised how little most people think about this. People outside the programming bubble just google programs and install them. For them there is no difference between open source, freeware, shareware etc. They have a task, they look for a free-as-in-beer software and then have an opinion on its quality. They have zero idea of how software is made or financed. For all they know or care, it could just fall out of the sky or grow on trees.

I'm sorry you had to handle that, but it's the nature of the world that some people are uncaring ingrates. Don't fixate on them. Most people do appreciate the work and effort.

"Commercial equivalent" might be more clear than "commercial version" - at first I thought the program was dual-licensed.

I honestly think Shotcut drove Black Magic Design to release a mostly complete free version of Davinci Resolve. It is just so good, that the leader in editing software had to make the tool free to most users.

Perhaps projects should include a "don't be an asshole" addendum to their license of choice that allows revocation in cases of abuse by users. It's a small thing to ask, but I'm not sure I like 2nd order and higher consequences of such an addendum.

But man, it would probably feel great to reply as @shotcut, "Your license to use shotcut has been revoked under section 8.3.4 of the license agreement. Please cease use of shotcut until remedies under section 8.3.4 have been made (public written apology for abusive behavior)".

>I've read similar comments on vlc, audacity, etc. The amount of complaints and lack of appreciation of OSS projects is absolutely mind boggling to me, yet we keep getting new amazing software for free.

I find the worst is with OSS projects that are intended to replace professional software. Software that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Gimp, shotcut(and other video editors), libreCAD, libreoffice, OSM, Ardour, inkscape, Krita, even linux itself.

I've seen some of the most vitriolic and nitpicky comments towards that and other similar software, over sometimes the stupidest things like ui differences to the commercial equivalents or something equally as shallow.

Myself, I'm just happy there's so much professional quality open source software. It may not have the bells and whistles of the fairly expensive commercial equivalents, but compared to only 15 years ago or so, the amount of software these days that will let you do professional quality work at home completely free is incredible to me and the quality of OSS offerings keep getting better, while in a lot of cases, the commercial versions seem to have focused almost entirely on converting as many of their products to services as possible.

I'm enormously grateful for high quality, open source software.

The haters know what to do: complain on forums, send in angry bug reports, etc.

What should we grateful ones do? I could email the author(s), if their email is available, but I worry that they don't want more spam.

This problem has a known solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet)

Consumers who don't know how a software is built, tend to take it for granted, have the attitude like software grows in trees and end up selling their data, soul and future to Big Tech which seems to give them everything 'for free'.

There's a reason why we haven't had successful kickstarter, indegogo like platform for software; People on average just don't want to pay for intangible stuff even if it affects every aspect of their lives.

Everyone is a creature of habit. So new tools should be tenfold better to kick the habit. Is ripgrep so good? Doubt it, although it’s definitely better.

I would say that grep is finished. Somebody, even the grep developers, may create something better, but it's something else, not grep. Even if it's called grep 4.0, there isn't much that one can change and still have the same software.

As someone who has shipped some of the biggest products at one of the biggest companies, I don’t think software is “finished” in a manner we ascribe to most products.

I do house projects and have built furniture, and when I “finish” those, there is nothing left to do. There is literally no additional work for those projects I can think of.

I’ve never shipped software that didn’t have bugs we didn’t fix, some feedback that didn’t get addressed, technical debt (test etc.) we didn’t get to, or features we wished we added.

Software is just a different beast to a lot of other things that you “finish”.

As long as you (a) don't publish your project as open source (i.e., keep it private on GitHub) or (b) put a really big fat warning in the README that it's an experiment that may be abandoned at any time and nobody should rely on it, I guess it's ok... but who really does that?

Sometimes I make a project just to learn something new. Sometimes I make a project just to prove that some crazy idea I had could actually work. Sometimes I make a project in order to reinvent old stuff in a new way that makes more sense to me.

> Let's just not kill fun by spreading pressure to "finish" or "get it done".

Completely agree. I have no idea why people are being shamed for walking away from projects. They aren't paying us, there's no incentive to offset the boring work. There is absolutely no obligation to finish anything. People who don't like that are more than welcome to do it themselves or pay for it.

If people want to spend time finishing and polishing a project, that is absolutely fine. However, it must happen because they wanted to do it, not because they were shamed for not doing it. Nobody has the right to tell people what to do with their valuable time.

What do you think about reframing “walking away” as “done!” or “done for now, no problem if I never get back to it before I die”? Done-enough rather than a nagging presence of unfinished work?

Edit to add: ties in with my reluctance to use “should” with myself or anyone else.

A project doesn't have to be that complicated to be useful. I've coded two utilities. One for converting IPs to their hex representation and back and linking it to various files automatically (for PXE booting), and another for using Mailgun from command line.

Both tools are 2-3 hour jobs, running on production for years, and they meet all the requirements. OTOH, if you want to extend them, you can improve them leaps and bounds and they'd be never finished in my life.

I love this quote from DaVinci: "Art is never finished only abandoned". I also consider software as a form of art (which we can debate if you feel), and in my book, software's never finished, only abandoned.

And, to be honest, I love how software is never finished.

What's the saying, "the last 20 percent takes 80 percent of the time"? That's why people don't finish. Once the fun part is over, they lose interest. The habit to develop is seeing things through that last bit of polishing.

When I was a teenager I would hop from project to project and rarely finish anything. I wouldn't necessarily say it was an addiction so much as I didn't know any better, and I would quit whenever I encountered a sufficiently challenging technical problem, because at that point the excitement waned, and the project actually became difficult. Then it was easy to get excited by a new project, which, in my head, would be all fun and no stress, until I encountered the next major technical challenge.

In order to break out of that pattern I had to recognize that I had a problem and that this pattern existed in the first place. Nowadays, I usually stick to smaller project with a well-defined scope, avoid starting too many projects, etc.

That being said, as a hobbyist, you have no duty to finish anything. In my opinion, it's OK to reassess your priorities from time to time. If you started something, and it's really become too stressful, you're not really sure where it's going anymore, it's OK to put it on ice and move to something else for a while. It's one thing to keep pushing because you really believe you'll be creating something that adds value to the world, it's another thing to punish yourself because hey, you really have to finish this thing, otherwise you're a quitter.

If you're working on a startup, you definitely don't want to quit, particularly if other people depend on you, but if you already have a full-time coding job, you don't want to burn yourself out working on side-projects, which is unfortunately possible. So you also have to learn to respect and accept your limits IMO.

I think it depends upon what you mean by 'start'. It can be fruitful to experiment with many projects, developing them to the point at which you can make a reasonable judgement as to their value.

You're right that once you seriously commit to a project, you should generally follow it through. But then perhaps that's the problem: people aren't seriously committing to projects, just playing around with them endlessly in a strategic abyss.

Quitting has its place and what I would avoid is absolutist thinking. You don't need to finish everything that you start. Sometimes you don't even want that as a goal like when exploring or developing prototypes. The only reason that, "only start what you're going to finish" sounds good is because people tend to imagine finishing a project the way they imagined it would be when they started. There is also the story of the person that toils away year after year on a project that probably isn't going to have the outcome they intended. Then again there are people that toil for years that seem hopeless only to make a major breakthrough. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world. No one path is certain.

That's nonsense. I translate that to "don't ever try to dig into GCC/LLVM/Linux Kernel, because you won't be able to 'finish' it" There are hundreds projects out there that are worth exploring even one will never 'finish' them, whatever that means

If you’re not careful, this stance is a really good way to never start anything.

Just my personal take, but be clear about what you don’t intend to “fix” or incorporate. Say it’s not aligned with the project goals and it’s not on the roadmap.

This will help folks evaluating the project better assess how well it fits, and leaves behind a potential feature set for a new project (or fork).

In the long run, not communicating might be worse than a disappointing but clear answer.

Priority and motivation can change pretty easily. You can think something is cool and interesting at the start, and then it fades over time. It’s just expectation vs reality, no different than a project car rusting in your garage or an unfinished novel etc

Please do - I'm inclined to doubt whether or not those projects have any substantial amount of value without actually seeing them.

When I was a teenager I finished a dozen software projects

Closed-source games for Windows 98

It was absolutely perfect. Closed-source, no one comes and complains they cannot compile anymore when the compiler and the library headers change. Games are just done, and if there are bugs they do not really matter. And Windows 98 apps still run perfectly on Linux with WINE.