Posted by on April 14, 2011
RIM’s developer twitter account (@BlackBerryDev) tweeted (this was on 4/14/11):
#WebWorks Open Source Software Projects are updated on @GitHub! http://bbry.lv/floPHT Have you contributed? #Github ^SA
This isn’t the first time that they have tweeted about this open source project and they have over 18,000 followers on twitter so there must be a lot of people helping them out right? I was curious and I clicked the link. It’s actually an old post from March 2nd of this year. The project has apparently been up on Github since December of last year. As it turns out, there are actually only three people helping them out. That does not surprise me one bit and I’ll explain why later. Looking through the forks and commits, it would also appear that these three people are all RIM employees. So I concluded that nobody is helping them out.
So RIM, if you are reading this, you are probably wondering yourself why nobody is helping. After all, sticking a project up on GitHub instantly gets you street cred with all the hackers out there right? Wrong.
Let me first say that I have very little knowledge on how to create APIs. Please correct me if I am wrong on any of this.
Open source is about people coding on something they are passionate about. Nobody is passionate about helping you finish your unfinished API! It is your own problem. In fact you aren’t even working on it yourself. Little to nothing has changed in the documentation for the API in three months, and the Playbook is shipping in less than a week. You are not even trying to start a community.
Another reason why developers contribute to open source is that they want to take a project and adapt it to their needs. You can change up the notification bar on Android or get rid of it if you don’t like it by editing the code. Then you submit it if you think other people also don’t like the notification bar (the notification bar is actually one of the best features of Android, I’m just using an example). An API isn’t really something that you customize in this way. It is the tool you use to make apps. If the tool isn’t there, I just won’t do the job. If I’m really passionate about the job, I might make the tools, but that’s usually the tool makers job. Google creates most, if not all, of the APIs for Android.
Developers can’t really take these APIs and use them on their own. They aren’t portable to other devices, nor can you take snippets of code for another device. If a developer can’t use it himself, why would he want to improve it.
But what pisses me off the most is that an open source project is not a way of getting “free” help for your late project. Developers are not dumb people, in fact they are probably the smartest bunch around and they can see right through you. They know you don’t understand what open source is about. I really hope that nobody helps you on your WebWorks project because you are essentially trying to exploit the labor of programmers.
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