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On Sat, 09 Oct 2010 17:16:15 +0100 tom brough <tombrough@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Doing a quick audit of FLOSS that would be useful to Schools and in > particular looking at school focused software portals like > SchoolForge, its disappointing to see that a lot of the listed > projects have not been updated in at least a year some a lot longer. Most of those are one-person "teams" which may sound as if things get updated often but it actually means "one-person managing many other one-person projects" (like me). Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that updates == good code. Stable code needs less updates, so check the number of outstanding bugs and assess their severity. Conversely, projects that constantly change may actually indicate a team in flux, a team engaging in internal flamewars and only ever fixing fires without actually thinking about the code overview. Stable code can be simply be good code which doesn't need frequent changes. There is no single measure of whether a project is alive or dead - except actually contacting all the team members, asking and waiting for a response. "Quick" audits are more than pointless - IMHO a quick audit actually hinders free software a lot more than the activity or lack of activity of the projects themselves. (Even then, remember that all these people are volunteers and will reply in their own time.) > Also a number of broken links on these sites are not impressive. That only matters if the links are still broken after trying to notify people in the team. How many teams did you try to contact as part of the audit? Was the audit anything more than 30 minutes on Google? > It > is inevitable that projects will fall by the wayside, but sadly this > does not help to promote the open source cause. Wrong. Abandoned upstream projects are never bad for open source / free software because the licence means that anyone with even a slight interest can just take a copy of the code and fix it. If the code really has gone to bitrot, there is usually something which can be recovered from the remnants - even if it is just the documentation. Dead upstream teams are only a problem when nobody has access to the code. If the ideas behind the projects are sufficiently interesting, someone will usually take on the project. That's the thing, free software doesn't come with a warranty, including fit for purpose. Therefore, it is not possible to audit free software on the basis of being fit for purpose. It is what *you* can make of it. If you need more from it, recruit people to help you fix it. Maybe the older kids could actually fix the code for the younger ones as an educational challenge.... -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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