Now ADempiere Fights Itself

Somehow when you reached the top of SourceForge most active rankings, you have no further need for enemies but yourselves. Lately we been seeing the community split in halves and the strongest contributors having to defend themselves against, well, their own community!

It all started some while ago over the integration of POSterita (another breakaway distro from early days) back into ADempiere. Read this record 111+ replies thread here. Then I tried to divert from the burning bush to the centre ring in the arena, but i myself came under more fire. So i am forced into a truce here. After some relative calm, an englishman fired up a small stove. This prompted a seeming plot that is still not cooled off at press time. But notice there my shrewd change of tactics. I changed sides!

Mortal combat in olden days do not last this long because, well, you really die from wounds. But not these virtual spats. As long as your keyboard has keys and your router does route, your fingers aren't crammed for tapping small horizontal spaces. And some probably do it vertically while lying in bed.

But all seemed well today when our greatest hero whom you either hate him or love him is to be overwhelmingly loved when he released these latest gems.

It was another close call and more action to come, as we have lost sight of our competition - Compiere and OpenBravo seems to stay away from the top rankings for quite some time now. There will be more days when ADempiere again turn on itself for game.  To relieve its boredom on the upward march to overcome proprietary software's hold on ERP space.

Aren't Bugs Free?

I put question mark there because i do not dare to end any sentence now without asking WDYT - what do you think?

My humble opinion and i am sure many in the developers' world (at least newbies) will share this common conclusion from here. That a developer ironically learns fastest or most from bugs and somethings s/he will inevitably breaks and the more the better.

Firstly its the psychological impact that he is responsible for breaking something and thus highly motivated to fix it. Thus bugs are not free and there are expensive in both cost of repair but more importantly in the cost of learning. Yep, bugs are more important to science than to life. And we are even more thankful to those bug finders out there for been the eyeballs we never have - covering areas we could never have the time and resources to as any software company will confess.

Now in the software development bazaar context, so are other developer eyeballs in their share of the psychological impetus. They equally feel responsible in trying to offer help or fix it and earn the kudo first. Call it peer pressure. It still cost something to make a whole bunch of nerds feel good. And the whole community at large feeling calm.

Now imagine the world of software without such bugs popping up now and then.  I know, i know, its best there are no bugs, but that does not exist with software. Software has a very short lifespan. If its left alone it will die say in 6 months. I mean death in competition and SourceForge :-)

For us in ADempiere, there are different types of bugs. Some are elegantly discovered and we say 'good catch!' Some are very rude self created ones, and we say "What in Farmer Jones' name were you trying to do?"  

Can we seriously have an utopia where all developers are born or made equal and behave equally? Not even in the Animal Farm fiction.

In the bazaar approach, Eric Raymond described it as chaos and put forward the paradoxical question of whether really good software can come out of an apparently disorganised un-cathedral approach?

Well it did. So get used to the farm-life will ya?