Use the Source, Luke

16 May 2012

All software is bad and it is not likely to change anytime soon. There is not a substantial difference between open source and commercial software when it comes to product quality. Both are difficult to use, very hard to diagnose and unsuitable for any practical purpose without a good deal of ugly hacking. But there is one little detail that actually makes a huge difference: source code.

I have spent most of today fighting with a code generation plugin that is part of our build. The code gave all kinds of helpful error messages such as "Index out of bounds: -1" and "null". There were no logs and no diagnostics output. The -verbose option was most likely provided just for the sake of completeness and had no practical effect. It was simply a dream of every engineer. A very bad dream.

I have been in such situation numerous times, mostly with commercial software. That was a nasty experience in vast majority of the cases. Usually I had to spend many hours reading the useless documentation provided with the product and trying to diagnose the problem using any available tool ... just to fail miserably. Then I would file a trouble ticket and play a long ping-pong match with the support team. If I would be really lucky, few weeks later after many exchanges (and my nerves almost lost in the process) I might have received a hint what the solution might look like. But the most likely outcome is that the support team provides no useful information and I would need to create an ugly workaround all by myself. This happened too many times already.

But today the situation was different. The package that I was using was not a commercial software. It was open source. So I have downloaded the source code, fought with it for a few minutes and finally I had a fresh build of my own. I have navigated the labyrinth of ugly uncommented code and dropped few debug messages here and there. After many attempts and failures I have figured out what is wrong. And solved the problem with only minimal amount of ugly hacking. In just one day.

Few weeks compared to one day. That looks like a huge difference to me. That's one of many reasons why I have stopped to use almost all commercial software. It is just not worth the time. If you don't have buildable and modifiable source code you have nothing. Nothing at all.

May the Source be with you.