Communities and Software
Sep 4, 21:46 by Lorna
Here at Woollyblanket we use a lot of open source software. This is usually developed by volunteers, starting off with someone who makes something to solve a problem and then shares it with the wider world. Other people might take the product and adapt it to their needs, adding functionality or generally changing it in some way – they then (traditionally although this is entirely optional) contribute their changes back to the original project to save yet more people inventing further bits of wheel.
The reviews on this site of the individual projects will often comment on the size and activeness of the community associated with that project. To the uninitiated, this must seem like an odd measure, or perhaps as if comment is being passed on the popularity of the product. Actually the size of the community has a much bigger impact that just a measure of how many people are using it.
Communities achieve great things – and they are not populated entirely by software geeks (although of course there are a fair few around) but by enthusiastic users. They do things like write and translate documentation, verify bugs, fix bugs and supply patches for everyone else to use to fix the same problem, test new versions, test on different platforms, and the list goes on. All this is essential to a successful and widely-used software project whether you have to pay money to get it or not. The volunteer communities in the open-source world really do give much more than that though.
Something about having something for nothing makes you want to do something in return in a kind of “one good turn deserves another” way. Users who find out how to do something with their product may write tutorials which will in turn help other users to benefit more from the software. Skins, plugins and reports are all fair game to be contributed en masse by the community at large. Textpattern in particular has a host of tutorials, examples, integrations, templates and who knows what else all online, its a library of help, suggestion, instruction and ready-to-use code to dip into to suit your needs and the way you want to work with the project. The material is always available at many different levels so its very accessible for a newbie but also there are answers for the more experienced developer pushing the boundaries of a product’s capability.
The community related to an open-source project is a major element of consideration when choosing a solution that will allow you to make good use of it with support if needed – especially if the intention is to use it in a business or production environment since commercial support is rarely available.
