If you don’t mind telling me what software you are using for the shopping cart.

“You are welcome to bitch about open source software. At the same time, though, the rest of the world has the right to judge you by your bitching.”

This, of course, is not unique to open source — the rest of the world also has the right to judge you about your bitching on proprietary software, or on the US Presidential campaign, or on how the Twins should’ve kept Santana.

In this case, you chose to bitch about open source software, and to hold up a scenario as a “great example”, a scenario that I find pretty awful. I am judging you based on your bitching, and am choosing to make that judgment public via these comments.

As a counter-example, take Zed Shaw’s nuclear rant on Rails (http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html). That is one heckuva bitch session about an open source project. Yet, in it, I didn’t get the sense that Zed messed up the open source process — he clearly was communicating with the affected projects, for example. That, combined with the fact that I’m familiar with his work on Mongrel, means I didn’t judge him nearly as harshly about his rant as I did your post. Of course, I’m human, and it could be Zed’s post was 10x worse and I just messed up in my analysis.

I mean, not even bitching and blaming the developers, just stating that you don’t use such project because you don’t like X or Y or that you miss Z feature is many times confronted with aggresive attitudes like “you cannot complain because it is free”, as if OS meant bug-free. And many times those attitudes are not from the developers themselves, but from the cohort of some vocal brainless fans that always gather around popular project. Sometimes , eventhe official forums of the project are also indefected with the attitude, and that damages OS as even the constructive criticism is frown upon.

As an example, I offered the same “criticism/opinion”to two projects, that the default logging settings were too verbose in my opinion as from my POV, shipping a public final release with logs set to DEBUG is a bit annoying and unnecesary for most final users. In one of the projects, the devs and community started a healthy discussion and an outcome was produced (it does not have to be always what you want, an explanation why it is like that is also something); on the other hand, the same opinion in another project was simply belittled with the reasonigns explained above “free=no right to complain, product is amazing, how can you even not agree completely?…”

In any case, commercial products also suffer from a similar problem but the answer is more like “you decided to buy it, if you didn’t like it, then you shouldn’t have bought it, so now shutp up!”.

So I’d agree it is a problem that plagues some projects, but fortunately not all OS projects are like that. Anyway, in the long run the former kind of projects are doomed to failure, as a succesful OS model is based on contribution from the community, and closing your ears to constructive criticism will only get you that far.

It’s another version of the “love is blind” defect of human beings ;)

S!

@All: Let me reiterate something my frequent readers know. I’m a huge open source advocate (http://davidwalsh.name/advocate). I appreciate the time commitment and effort that goes into the tools that many of these programmers spend their free time building.

The makes of the cart in my example are no exception. The product they have provided is extremely important to many online business owners and I have praised them in the past. I do, however, feel as though it’s OK to complain about aspects of ANY given project, open source or not.

Please don’t misread my intentions with my question!

@AOSD: Thank you for taking the time to post and keep up the good work. It’s great to get an open source dev’s opinion here.

@Rob: What I mean by “bitch” is a good point. When I use that term, I don’t mean flame the software on message boards and write regrettable emails to the devs. By bitch, I mean look at the programmer next to me and say “Why the hell didn’t they do……..?” It’s not necessarily meant as a super negative thing — my bitching tends to come with a laugh and a shake of the head.

@Mark: Again, I wish you’d read my question as more general. Name a commercial project — that gets bitched about too. My question is also meant to ask if you believe open source projects shouldn’t be held to the same standard because they’re free to download and use. Thank you for your input though!

Quite possibly. Got any specifics?

“but the layout issue is something I would see as extremely important.”

If a team were building a shopping cart system from scratch, and they had the choice between table-based and div/css-based layouts, I would sincerely hope they would choose the latter.

That is a far cry from expecting a product with a number of customers (“used by many small to mid-sized online stores”) to dump their current system. Maybe they aren’t in position to maintain two layouts with their current staff. Maybe their community isn’t worried about the issue. Maybe they’re like me — given a stylesheet and template I do OK making changes, but I couldn’t come up with a decent div-based layout from scratch if my life depended on it, and so unless somebody offers a patch and agrees to maintain it, the new layout just ain’t happenin’.

And none of that is helped by you venting to the public and not somehow relaying this opinion to the project.