Open Source Should Be Read/Write

Linus Torvalds is a busy guy.  Not content with pushing badge-name Unix vendors into the land of the legacy system, and creating an operating system that’s nigh on won the server market (It’s not looking too shabby on mobile and embedded systems, either), he somehow managed to find the time to revolutionise source code management as well.  Anyone who’s jumped straight between Subversion* and git will know quite how radical a change it is.  But the reason I love it is that it’s fundamentally changed the mindset of open source software.

You see, although open source projects were meant to be collaborative, the repositories are necessarily authoritative.  Who has access to it was necessarily limited by the governing body (or person).  If you aren’t on the approved list, you had to prove yourself before you got access.  So, imagine you’re using Fluent NHibernate and discover that you can’t make a composite primary key that references another composite key (true at the time of writing).  You download the code and make the change.  But now what are you going to do?

• Stick together a patch (you need to change all of five lines, IIRC) and hope that the overworked maintainers get around to incorporating it before you need to download the code again.
• Change the code, and keep your own copy of the code.  Stop updating your version, losing all subsequent improvements to the main branch.

If Fluent NHibernate was on Subversion, those would be your only options.  However, Fluent NHibernate is on GitHub, so you can create a quick fork, make the change and send a pull to the maintainers.  They can choose to incorporate the change or ignore it, but you can keep updating your version in line with their changes.  Git and GitHub are part of a revolutionary democratisation of the open source software development process.  The whole mindset is different.  Before, a fork was something you had to justify carefully and set clear blue water between you and the maintainers.  You set yourself up as an authority in competition with them.  On GitHub, you fork because you’re interested, it’s a compliment to the maintainers not a challenge. 

Power To The People

The great thing with Git and GitHub is the implicit change in approach, but there’s still much more to do.  One of my personal bugbears is the completely impenetrable nature of build systems on .NET.  There’s a reason I keep documenting build instructions, and there’s a reason that this is one of the most popular articles on my site, entirely from natural search.  Those articles typically were the result of well over a day’s work.  If you’re thinking that everyone should spend a week of pain before they can build your project, you’re an elitist and I suggest you consider whether you’re on the right side of the argument. 

For that matter, exactly where do I download the binaries?  Every project has a different answer.  We’ve just got friction on top of friction here.  We’ve got nothing even remotely resembling Gems in ALT.Net (why exactly that is would probably take another 900 word post…).

My First OSS Project

My first try at an OSS project was an unmitigated disaster.  The idea was really simple: provide a tool that would download and build common .NET open source packages.  Sounds easy enough unless you’ve ever tried it.  Just figuring out a reliable command line way of installing ruby was a challenge (not sure I ever exactly nailed it).  The Horn guys gave up as well and started to redirect the project towards something they could actually build.  The SymbolSource guys tried to address another problem with not being able to build the code: the fact that you can’t sensibly debug it.

But, with all due respect to the Horn and SymbolSource projects, they’re just introducing some extra authorities to help me with some of the problems of my existing authorities.  What I, and most developer, want and need, is to be able to easily build their own versions of open source projects, whatever version they like (including trunk).  You want to work with some code, discover a problem, step through it, figure out what’s going on and fix it,

Here’s an idea: how about open source projects have solution files which you can get straight out of source control that actually build?**  Radical, I know.  The Castle project can do that, and goes to a fair amount of effort to achieve that.  nServiceBus is way off.  If you had that, combining versions would be a cinch: just merge the solutions together and away you go.

GitHub’s great, but it’s only part of the story.  There’s still a lot more to do before Open Source is truly open to all.  It’s the right thing to do, and it sure beats complaining about how the average developer doesn’t care about ALT.NET.

*or worse, I’m using TFS…

**There’s a couple of technical issues like what you do with parallel Silverlight and .NET versions, but at worst that’s solvable with a quick batch file entitled “RunMeAfterPerformingGetLatest.cmd”.

Update: I’d originally asserted that Castle Core didn’t 100% build from the solution.  Roelof Blom pointed out on Buzz that this was incorrect.  I’m happy to correct the article.

Postscript: If you want to know more about the poster, read the full article at the International Museum of Women.