I'm a pain in the WiX ;-)

I’m getting beat up a little bit on the WiX Toolkit mailing lists.  L  It seems that since I’ve been questioning some issues (here and here), and now Rob and Orion think I’m on a war-path.  They’ve got me all wrong.  I’ve given tons of time to helping other people solve their problems and it would be completely out of character for me to try to undermine everything I’ve done by being obnoxious for no reason.  I tend to write passionately and in a very “animated” sort of way.  I guess sometimes that comes off like a rant or something, but it’s not intended that way.

Anyway, this got me thinking about what it means to run or be a part of an open source project.

Pride has got to be a serious factor for Rob.  I mean, he wrote this thing all by himself and obviously poured his heart and soul into it.  Freely and openly sharing something that cost you so much time and energy is hard enough with out someone like me coming along and being critical of your implementation decisions.  I know how hard it is to make those critical decisions along the way.  ActiveInstall was nearly a half-million lines of code and I can’t begin to count the number of nights I spent staring at the ceiling while trying to make key decisions.  At the end of the day, you just have to make the best decisions you can, and be prepared to deal with the fallout if you are wrong.  And sometimes you are wrong.  I made mistakes, and I suspect Rob has too.

I hope that Rob will come to think of it more like this:

What he did all by himself is excellent!  It’s a stellar piece of work for sure.  But now, by opening it up for all to see and scrutinize, it can get even better.  There’s three ways that can happen:

1. Bug identification and fixes through normal usage
2. Enhancement or contributions from the community (think smoke)
3. Revision/Refactoring driven by public scrutiny

It’s number three that is the most intriguing to me today.  The first two are no brainers, but the third is less obvious, yet much more profound in my opinion.  It may be painful at first to hear criticism or to have someone challenge what you say, or the decisions you made, but isn’t that the true (or hidden) power of open-source?  In my opinion, the real value is not that people can find bugs in your source code, or that like minded people will contribute new code to it, it is that the best and brightest minds around can join in and question everything!  The host should encourage discussion and yes – even debates over features and implementation decisions.  This only serves to either improve the product or validate the decisions that have already been made.

While I really don’t want to be viewed as a trouble-maker, I’m gonna keep on doing what I’ve been doing.  Why?  Because I care.  Because I like WiX and want to see it grow and mature.  Because I want to be a part of it’s success. 

‘Nuff said!