You don’t pay Rémy to be polite now … do you ?
That Bob Bronson fellow got pretty offensive, and Rémy’s reaction is justified.

On the contrary, I think I found Rémy’s response quite amusing!! ;) :)

Now, I don’t fully agree with the sentiment that “since you don’t pay for an open-source project, you got no right to complain”. Ofcourse we’ve got right to complain. But what I really hate is people’s attitude with which they complain. If you are unhappy with something or there’s something wrong with the project, the same can be conveyed to the people in charge in a polite & easy going way instead of just throwing up a tantrum. Even if you pay for a product/service & it runs into a problem, then that doesn’t mean you’ve got the right to get all mad at the developers. They too are human & are liable to mistakes. IMHO, being polite is the way to go irrespective of whether you pay for the product/service or not. Getting mad at anyone like this doesn’t help get things moving better or fast!!

I think it is about time you grow up.

Open-source products are ussualy made by sellfish programmers that want to use those products for their own sellfish purposes.

Developing an open-source project is very expensive, and if you want to use such a project you have to be prepared to:

a) ask for help with politeness

b) give back and help the project grow

You don’t pay Rémy to be polite now … do you ?
That Bob Bronson fellow got pretty offensive, and Rémy’s reaction is justified.

O, ho, ho … missed this part … sorry.

So, you think you can do better than the Tomcat developers ?
Proove it !

The first step is to show us your portfolio ;-)
Or better yet … build a better Tomcat.

That should show us :)

What the hell are you talking about ?
Don’t want to use it … then don’t, and stop spreading nonsense.

As David says … Kindness is the currency of open source support.
Don’t like it ? Again … stop using it.

> Besides, do you really think that they would accept my code?
> Who am I to come in and tell the architects of tomcat that they are
> doing it all wrong?

If you are worthy enough, you can become a tomcat architect yourself.
You’ll have to have many succesfull code submissions in order to do that.

But then again, you are some weirdo that bashes open-source projects … nice way of spending time.

So let’s start paying the market value for the Apache web server and all those other open source products that code critics like to gang up on. That shouldn’t suck more than $3 or $4 billion out of the world’s wallets, now should it.

Besides, do you really think that they would accept my code? Who am I to come in and tell the architects of tomcat that they are doing it all wrong?

Open source is coding by committee. If the committee believes that they are doing the right thing, nothing will change their mind. Certainly an arrogant know-it-all like me doesn’t stand a chance.

Jonathan

And how much did you *PAY* for that Omega drive? Apache isn’t a for-profit organization so don’t expect them to behave as one. We buy a piece of hardware we expect it to work because …. we paid for it. We don’t pay a dime for Apache’s stuff (unless you contribute cash, but then you wouldn’t flame ‘em if you did that now would you?)

In management we like to say “don’t come to us with a problem unless you have at least two solutions otherwise you are just whining and haven’t thought the problem through.”

If you aren’t part of the solution then you are part of the problem. Instead of wasting time (like I am) posting to this message fire up Netbeans and get to coding and help the Tomcat team out.

If the tomcat developers were aware with a problem with Xerces, then they should have either chosen a different component or altered tomcat to deal with it. At the very least, a warning message saying “You are using Xerces version X. We recommend you upgrade to version Y.” is in order. If no version Y exists, then its time to drop Xerces for something that does works.

If I call up IOMega and say that their DVD Drive doesn’t work with Windows Vista, they wouldn’t tell me to file a bug with Microsoft. They would either fix their driver to work around Vista’s failings or call Microsoft themselves.

Lets say the user did call on the Xerces team. What would he say? “The tomcat people say you have a bug. I don’t know your code or their code so I cannot tell you what’s wrong, but could you please fix it anyways because they won’t help me.”

I know exactly how they should respond, “Please have the tomcat people contact us directly so that we can work with them to correct this issue.” (Of course if they are anything like the tomcat developers, they will most likely just blame tomcat.)

Jonathan Allen

Open Source gives you the ability to do what you are doing. Usually though if you are going to go through the trouble to bug hunt the source, it is customary to squash a few. Detractor or Contributor?

Remy’s responce was not good, but it was not out of line for how he was being treated.

I for one was aghast and outraged at seeing that code. I seriously considered dropping my other projects to concentrate on getting tomcat to at least the quality I would expect from a junior programmer. Then I read this posting…

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tomcat-dev/200511.mbox/%3c436B326D.3080108@apache.org%3e

Who does this Rémy think he is? There is no reason to treat someone who is obviously upset and frustrated in such an unkind and arrogant manner. I for one don’t want to work with someone like this. People like that give all of open source a bad name.

Tomcat has been measured and found wanting. Do we fix it or concede defeat?

Jonathan Allen

Granted that some of the lines of code you mentioned aren’t the best but lets someday take a peak at Microsoft’s IIS … what do you think you’ll find there? OSS is as much about learning as it is about being free. If you’re not looking to spend a little time to excersise that lonely brain cell or contribute and fix the things you are whining about then go spend the loot and buy a commercial project but don’t bash people that are doing the rest of us a favor.

Signed: Ticked at meathead bloggers.

Take a step back and consider what is being accomplished.

(I’ll assume that “debug” has some default value before entering the segment.)

All that this segment “says” is “get a new value for “debug” and set it; if this activity fails for any reason, ignore and continue with prior, default value.

“Good coding” does not require that each and every thrown exception needs to be handled, especially in blocks that are not dealing with user interaction.

Jim

Silly mistakes will be fixed asap when the project owner gets informed in open source projects. However, closed source projects have similar mistakes, but nobody can easily dig in to like in this case.

I thank the author of this article, and encourage him to take part in the development of TomCat project.

Something to check out at least.

Hmmm. Yes, I just reloaded the page, and the server’s still only downloading the first part ofthe article… :)

I’d like to see what response (I wouldn’t go so far as to say defence) they give to this critique.