Reply to post: Re: "I guess that nobody wants to commit to the learning curve."

Re: "I guess that nobody wants to commit to the learning curve."

When software is Open Source and free (as opposed to commercially supported Open Source software), is it really fair to expect the author/maintainer to produce the reams of documentation - that often take longer than the actual coding/testing work itself - necessary that you are implying?

I agree. It's not fair to expect much of anything of open-source software, beyond what's claimed by documents with some legal standing, such as licenses.

However, a wise developer might examine an open-source package to see if the source was developed using decently-written, maintainable code before adopting it. Or make the commitment to understand the code anyway (which was my position with OpenSSL back in the 0.9.8 days - the code was pretty awful, so I spent some time learning it).

The Javascript open-source ecosystem is toxic, with a vast array of poorly-written, poorly-maintained packages being used willy-nilly by developers who aren't interested in making the slightest effort to understand them, often for trivial things (need I mention left-pad?), and dependency graphs that surpasseth all understanding. But the situation is similarly bad in many parts of the open-source world. There are relatively few C programmers who are capable of writing decent C, for example, but there's a lot of open-source C. There are relatively few C++ programmers willing to write maintainable C++. Languages like Python also suffer from dependency disease.