Give back to the community (please?)

Last week, I was ticked off by the behavior of a colleague: he complained the duplicated code panel in Sonar was not explicite enough. When I remarked he could give feedback to the Sonar team, he replied he had other things to do!

As for me, I use OpenSource projects since a while back: Struts was my first, but now there are the whole Apache frameworks (Log4J, CXF and Commons just to name a few), Spring, Hibernate, Vaadin of course but also tools like Maven, Hudson/Jenkins, Sonar and the list goes on! All these projects are not only open sourced, they are free – as a beer! Even better, all of them have detailled documentation and a user base that equivalent commercial products sometimes lack.

Of course, companies publishing these frameworks aren’t there for the glory, they have to earn money. And yet, I can use them “as-is” and have the framework behave just like for a regular enteprise paying user. I don’t think there are many industries in the world where the production bricks are available at no cost as is the case in the software industries.

However, using these frameworks/tools without paying is a one-way deal. Yet, we can provide editors with a much valued thing: feedback. Commercial editors use time and money to conduct surveys that will direct their development effort. But just as we are provided with free products, we can provide OpenSource software editors with a costly resource, our own opinion.

That’s why it’s very important to take only 10 minutes to fill an issue or an enhancement request. Besides, it will benefit all of us in the next product version. So please provide your favorite editor with feedback!

Note: since the initial complaint was not fully unjustified, I’ve filled a Jira describing the request

From http://blog.frankel.ch/give-back-to-the-community-please