There’s another form of OSS debt I originally thought you might be talking about when I saw this article and it’s quite common. It happens when a dev in say 2017 finds an OSS package to use in a project because it solves a problem — say it’s an image tool like FFMPEG (ffmpeg.org/). Works great, the dev moves on to other problems. Fast forward a few years — ffmpeg working great so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it right? But meanwhile…there have been many updates to ffmpeg, fixing bugs, including known security bugs. Because it’s been 4 years since you’ve updated, updating may be quite a task — the interface may have changed, and of course you have to test that all your use cases of ffmpeg still work — and you DID write automated tests for those back in 2017, right?
This is where open source software is free as in “free puppies” not as in “free beer” — you have to care and feed it. That’s another example of OSS debt.
Yeah Mike, thats is also a duty to take care of, as Often myself make issues on github repos about updating the repo or make the repo archive as you can see in one of mine issues I created on github github.com/dannyconnell/localbase/...
I will say it is hard to maintain the project, but if project is large enough to back the developer, then it is great, but often times it is hard to get at that level. So yeah it kinda becomes free pupies like.
Open Source is a wide subject, and constists of mulitple factors. There are still alot of things that I am still exploring, I will surely update this article after year or so.
And Thanks for taking time to comment, and to read.
It really makes me happy alot that you gave your time to me.
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There’s another form of OSS debt I originally thought you might be talking about when I saw this article and it’s quite common. It happens when a dev in say 2017 finds an OSS package to use in a project because it solves a problem — say it’s an image tool like FFMPEG (ffmpeg.org/). Works great, the dev moves on to other problems. Fast forward a few years — ffmpeg working great so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it right? But meanwhile…there have been many updates to ffmpeg, fixing bugs, including known security bugs. Because it’s been 4 years since you’ve updated, updating may be quite a task — the interface may have changed, and of course you have to test that all your use cases of ffmpeg still work — and you DID write automated tests for those back in 2017, right?
This is where open source software is free as in “free puppies” not as in “free beer” — you have to care and feed it. That’s another example of OSS debt.
Yeah Mike, thats is also a duty to take care of, as Often myself make issues on github repos about updating the repo or make the repo archive as you can see in one of mine issues I created on github github.com/dannyconnell/localbase/...
I will say it is hard to maintain the project, but if project is large enough to back the developer, then it is great, but often times it is hard to get at that level. So yeah it kinda becomes free pupies like.
Open Source is a wide subject, and constists of mulitple factors. There are still alot of things that I am still exploring, I will surely update this article after year or so.
And Thanks for taking time to comment, and to read.
It really makes me happy alot that you gave your time to me.