My early impressions of open source software is that "open source" is synonymous with "buggy." It pains me to say that, because I love the grass roots energy of the open source movement. I like being part of something that feels utopian, or at least populist.
But I'm also comfortably used to software that works, that has thorough, readable documentation, that follows a set of standards, and that has been thoroughly tested and debugged. So this is a new experience - wasting/spending hours on making software work before actually being able to work with it.
And I'm enough of a geek to be enjoying that new experience. (I don't think I ever claimed to be consistent.)
I'm finding that another synonym for "open source" might be "rude." I've been working with an open source content management system that is unbelievably frustrating to use. The CMS's site has lots of documentation, much of it good, but it's fragmented, incomplete, often referring to older versions than I'm using, much of it containing broken links.
Yet, despite that, people are very ready to scold one another for what they think are stupid questions posed to the forum - and I quote "People should read the code and docs before posting questions." Sheesh. Would it have killed the cranky person who wrote that to mention which of the literally thousands of files of code and which of the thousands of docs?
I wish the populous involved with this system cared enough about it to try to lower, instead of raise, the barriers to entry for us newbies who've inherited large, hacked systems that we now need to master.
