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Comment Re:Microsoft Has Gone Downhill (Score 1) 65

It could be a combination of enormous technical debt, high complexity caused by many layers of backward compatibility, and something else I have observed in one of their open-source projects: the capable and experienced people moving (or being moved) to a different team/project and the maintenance getting handed to other people that are way less experienced/capable.

Comment Re:Celibacy == Can't read scriptures (Score 1) 101

Times change.

However:

"I am the LORD, and I do not change." -- Malachi 3:6 (NLT)

"Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father (...). He never changes or casts a shifting shadow." -- James 1:17 (NLT)

Public opinion about what's acceptable changes all the time. Gods standards for right and wrong never change however, and will never change.

Comment Dependability (Score 2) 58

Suppose you are maintaining your own little open source or free software project. Dependencies can be a real problem. Other projects you depend on may suddenly become unmaintained, or the few maintainers those projects have are too busy with other things. You report a bug to them and it gets ignored. You fix the bug yourself, and the pull request or patch you provide just sits there collecting dust. Some library you use may one day deprecate or drop some functionality that you really need. Or they may decide to make some source incompatible changes to their API. This happens all the time.

This is why I try to keep dependencies to a minimum.

One example: TagLib. So many projects depend on that, but it doesn't seem to have an active maintainer right now. Its last release was almost 4 years ago, and it has collected lots of unreleased changes since. But there is no one to actually make a release. Last commit was 5 months ago. And it has 20 pull requests waiting to get merged.

There is no easy solution for this. People are busy. Maintaining a project can be a thankless job. People need to get food on the table, and maintaining an open source project in your free time does not do that. Working on an open source project can be fun, but it also has its boring parts. And life can get in the way of things.

So I agree that it is a people problem.

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