YJL

1   too many

Just like “too much of a good thing” can become a bad thing, open source could face the same fate. When you have ten active projects do the same thing, it’s not a blessing, but destined to waste a lot of resources to achieve the same goal.

I used to think re-invent the wheel is a good thing, but not anymore. That should only be happening when a project is no longer viable to develop.

Not only the projects, but also the programming languages. If you have paid attention, there are quite a lot of new programming languages popping up. I really don’t understand why people keep trying to fix existing programing language by creating new ones, instead of fixing.

New language, new set of core libraries, extra set of libraries, more sets of bindings of libraries, lots more documenting, do I have to go on?

When you have too many options, it become harder to choose from or you just waste more time to try immature projects.

I’d believe some developers just want to put something under their name or account, even when there is well-known project already, they still choose to create a new one instead of contribute to existing one. For hoping to gain more fame, perhaps?

2   too few

Oftentimes, I saw good projects having no users while lame projects are trending for no particular reasons. It’s really sad to witness that, and that does happen a lot.

One theory I have is we have too many projects, which makes good stuff being buried among bad ones. Another is search engine is just crappier than ever, therefore good projects can never have a chance to be seen.

Over the years, I found it’s more difficult than ever to seek for a project that fits to my needs when I know there must be not just one out there. But no matter how I try, I could never find one.

Not only projects, but information or anything else. You would think free—as in freedom—Internet is good for information exchange or communication, but not really. Internet is getting worse every year, harder to find useful things.

So it might not be too few users of a project but too few people are able to get to know about the projects they need.

3   too little

Contributions, issues, there seems to be lacking of quality. People just don’t contribute or don’t know how to file a proper bug report, don’t want to request a feature.

Ask yourself how many times that you just ignore an error in last year? I bet many have even thought about filing a bug report. We are no more putting efforts to make things better even we use the things every day.

You don’t need to be someone who can code to file a proper issue, but you need to put a little more to write one.

There is also another too little, the so-called developers know too little about the thing. We have just too many bad coders, who ain’t really qualified to code. Lack of coding skill is fine, but lack of ability to learn isn’t.

4   too late

When a project’s development slows down, stale, or, the worst, become inactive, it’s almost too late for an enthused user’s feedback, even it’s a good one. The project loses its momentum, the developers might not even want to see any issues coming into their inbox.

This also goes in another way, the developers late for answering to the users. It’s quite common, an issue gets replied days after filed. It’s too late. Lots of pull requests with good contributions, but never get to be merged.

It’s shame when some user finally notices the project and spend time to file a good bug report or request, but never get a reply. The developers seem to simply disappear from the project altogether. Of course, it’s also a shame that the reporter never continue to participate own issue when the developers reply in timely fashion.

Also features come to late. Everyone has its own limit of patience. Waiting for a feature to be implemented or a bug to be fixed, sometimes, it’s just plainly pain. You want to see it happening, but it ain’t gonna happen. If you can code, then you probably could do by yourself, but many people are just a user. All they can do is wait, or find another project.