Salivating about Open Source Software - Pavlov’s conditioning?

I remember the early days of Java Open Source Software. We all used to keep track of any new OSS release and literally salivate at being able to use something for free. When Tomcat came out I was one of the early adopters, same with Ant, JUnit, HttpUnit, Gcj, even tcl-tk based Java IDE’s and tons of others. I have to say I use many of them even today like Tomcat, JUnit, HttpUnit, Ant, Apache etc.

Times have changed. I have been burned once too many times by OSS. Examples include Magnolia, Mambo(PHP based), Maven, Jelly, Struts and tons of others. Some were pushed down my throat too.

BTW 1: This is not another OSS rant. I have been burnt by commercial software too (like Silk), but much fewer.

But the thing is even though I sometimes still salivate, nowadays I don’t rush headlong into yet another adventure. Life is too short to be playing around and trying to dig through the morass of human stupidity. These days I tend to rely on few trusted lieutenants. And I let others be burned first. However in some cases I do make an exception. When the documentation is clear and the architecture looks sound, I do download and test them out to see how it works. Maybe in future intelligent documentation will be a key differentiator of projects.

BTW 2: We need newer keywords for bullet points. Every software under the sun is now “scalable”, “modular”, “lightweight”, “simple”, “customizable” and what not. Hey my HelloWorld.java is all of the above too. Unfortunately it doesn’t do much else.

So like we are all conditioned to sex and violence in movies, I think I am getting conditioned to flashy new releases with strange names. How about you?

BTW: 3It is for this reason you don’t see many product announcements in this blog.

BTW 4: I am bothered by this strange disease which afflicts whoever names these projects. Why can’t they give decent names which provide some clue to the meaning of the software? Compared to today’s names I have begun to appreciate yesterday’s stupid names like awt and yacc. At least they had some meaning.