• I live in San Francisco.
• I married Kendra.
• I work at GitHub.
• I tweet at @pjhyett.
• I email at pjhyett@gmail.com.
• I enjoy traveling.

How Not to Open-Source

Programmers are arguably some of the smartest people in the world. We solve complex problems all day, every day, and we’re always hungry for more. We strive to find simplicity in even the most complicated situations. If Eistein were alive today, he’d probably be hacking the Linux Kernel along side Alan Cox during his lunch break.

The issue arises when you take those minds, throw in the impersonality of the internet, and mix in a whole bunch of ego.

Case in point: Vlad the Deployer. It was written as a Capistrano replacement to handle application deployment simpler than the aforementioned project. Make no mistake, the library rocks; I’m using it in production already.

Capistrano certainly became the victim of its own success. It needed to be everything to everyone in the Rails community, because it was the only thing out there that handled deployment with any sort of ease.

Futhermore, its author, Jamis Buck, recently said that its dependencies were written at a different time and place than he’s in now and has been working on rewriting them to remove unnecessary complexity. It takes a big person to admit that his hugely successful application needs a lot of work.

It doesn’t take a big person to rip on an open-source app that has been one of the most useful libraries for Rails since the framework’s inception. Vlad’s authors, the Ruby Hit Squad, have made it some bizarre mission of theirs to insult Capistrano in an attempt to promote their replacement. I have no idea what they’re accomplishing with their tactics (see image above for an example) other than alienating someone that dedicates a portion of his time contributing to a framework that allows them to make their livelihood programming in Ruby.

I’m picking on Vlad, but I’ve seen this time and time again with open-source projects and find the attitude unbelievably off-putting as it reflects poorly on the open-source community as a whole. I’m certainly not immune to bad-mouthing projects that I’m not excited about, but I’d like to think that as the years progress that I’m learning to control the emotions that ran rampant when I was 16.

As the saying goes, “Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.” Let others know about your alternative, but allow the code do most of the talking for itself.