Open-source projects that lack agility

I like open-source libraries. I use dozens or perhaps hundreds in my work. I’m going to single out one downside that irritates me no end. Projects can be slow to respond to the community. At least, that’s been my experience.

I recently needed a fix in Hibernate, and there was already an issue for it. I sat down, wrote the fix and a unit test, and attached both along with the diff. After getting no answer for a while, I got annoyed and sent it straight to the person responsible for the component. No answer there either. Another example. Over the weekend I’d stretched DbUnit as far as it would go and had to extend it in the source. Having learned from my earlier failures, I sent the patch directly to one of DbUnit’s authors with an explanation. Again, no reply.

Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but I’ve had several experiences like this. Hibernate surprised me most, because with Red Hat behind it you’d expect support to be taken care of. No such luck. It probably doesn’t bring them any money, so there’s no support. To be fair, I’ve had a good experience too. I recently reported a Spring bug and got a reply very quickly.

I believe Hibernate (JBoss ;-) is the exception that proves my own rule. Without someone with a commercial stake, a project is about as agile as the Christian Democrats were in the Čunek affair. For readers unfamiliar with Czech politics, that means playing dead. A company behind a project has a natural interest in providing good documentation, support, consulting and community engagement. There isn’t anything else it can make money from with open source.

Without commercial backing, it’s only a matter of time before a project goes downhill. That isn’t the authors’ fault. They may simply lack the time or resources. Hats off to the exceptions. I think one way to make open-source projects more responsive is for the companies that use them commercially to get involved again. Set aside some of a developer’s working hours for contributing to the open-source projects the company uses. That would give it a natural commercial stake in their success.