And if you do ask…

…you just might!

The school received my comments but have no idea what I’m talking about. They would like me to go it and discuss it with their IT coordinator.

Another result!

If you don’t ask…

…you don’t get.

My childrens school sent out a questionnaire, which we returned this morning. It was the usual stuff – Are you happy with the amount of homework? What improvements would you make to the school facilities? etc.

It was the final question that caught my eye though: Any other comments? A fairly innocuous question you may think, but I saw a perfect platform for me:

I also added a note that I was happy to discuss this with them. Nothing may come of it, but on the other hand…

Close, but no cigar

Want to hear a couple of respected .NET developers talk about Open Source? Go and listen to the episode of of Hanselminutes entitled Open Source Options. I found it both infuriating and enlightening at the same time.

How can it be both? Because it’s two commercially-oriented software developers discussing a concept they don’t seem to fully grasp or understand. I sure this is in part due to the format and constraints of the show – Scott Hanselman seems to be an intelligent guy, and I’m confident he knows more about Open Source than came across but it didn’t come across that way. It was interesting to see how Open Source is perceived by them, and their take on some of the problems we face.

Go listen and see what you think.

Why undersell?

In his latest post
Aq. talks about two new directions for the LugRadio offspring Jokosher of which both sound excellent.

However he mentions the release schedule for Jokosher:

…and my immediate reaction was “why 0.1? why not 1.0?”. I know the Open Source way is to release early and release often – which is A Good Thing™ by the way – but I do object to the way projects pick < 1 version numbers to indicate their maturity (or lack thereof), because they’re underselling themselves. One of the common complaints levelled at Linux and Open Source Software is that nothing is ever finished, and this is because a vast number of projects never reach that golden 1.0 milestone. It hasn’t stoppped them being in widespread use, but they still give the impression they’re not ready yet. Why didn’t they hit 1.0? Because they reached the point where they were ‘good enough’ and didn’t need to go any further.

If it’s good enough to be used by the others, then give it a 1.0 version number to show that. It doesn’t matter if it’s not complete – as 37 signals would say:

It obviously does something otherwise you wouldn’t be releasing it yet, so say that. If it’s not then you shouldn’t be – you won’t stop yourself or the early adopters from using it by doing this and in the long run you’ll end up with a much better first release.

Just in case this post does get misinterpreted in someway, I’m using Jokosher purely as an example here. I’ve no idea how ‘mature’ it is, nor do I have an opinion on whether they should or shouldn’t release it at LugRadio Live. I just don’t want the team behind it – or any other project – to undersell themselves.