I’m approaching my first year anniversary at OSAF and I’m still amazed at how the Open Source process works. I’m saying “process” here because there’s more to Open Source than just code: specs, ideas and sheer energy, all of these are part and parcel of Open Source.

This point was recently driven home (for me at least) last week when I received an email from Bill Bumgarner himself (the PyObjC maintainer) kindly pointing to some inaccuracies in a doc I wrote some months ago.

Now, it’s a pretty simple and very Chandler centric doc and I was quite surprised to see how much exposure it got. In any other company, such a doc would have been maintained privately in some obscure project and no one outside the project, not even other people at the company, would have commented on it but since I posted it publicly (as everything we do at OSAF), I regularly receive questions and comments from people who read it. Most of them are folks who, like us, are developing an application and are shopping around for a cross platform UI framework. Some of those emails are from people like Bill who are commenting the document and, in the process make it better while teaching me a couple of things I didn’t know.

So here you see the Open Source process in all of its glory: you post something you thought very narrow in scope, it gets picked, you get feedback and comments from people interested in the same subject, you learn something and everyone has a better doc as a result. Iterate often and you get something actually useful.

I’m telling you: I’m glad I joined OSAF last year, really, I haven’t learnt as much since college. Thanks to all for your comments.

P.S.:

• I posted an updated framework doc but remember that this is a very centric Chandler view of the problem
• David wrote a more interesting doc on how to evaluate application frameworks that you should read if you are in the business of shopping around for one.
• There are other people commenting on cross platform frameworks that might be more adequate for your project. Jon Hoyle has a very interesting one for instance, commenting on Qt and wxWidgets from a Mac perspective. There are certainly others.