My Feelings on Open Source

At work I've been doing some work thats quite a bit different from what I'm used to. Essentially I'm using an Access DB. I'm not exactly cool with this. Putting the front end on it introduced me to VBA so there is that. What bothers me about it is how restricting the supplied environment is on the development process. If you run into an error due to a null reference or similar, I find that I can't look at the DB to see where in my queries I went wrong. Very strange. My theory on what is actually happening is that MS developed a GUI for a Database system, then built the DB system and entirely integrated the UI into the DBMS entirely violating MVC.

This may not be true, I think the whole OLE 'framework' introduces massive (for my tastes) coupling to the system. Which explains why no effort was put into a CLI for Windows. I think its very strange and coming from development on a Linux system, doing ANYTHING the OLE way is not very comfortable.

So at work we started talking about using different plugins or 3rd party workarounds to get things the way you want them in windows. The problem is that these solutions aren't supported by anyone other than some script kiddies which yeilds 0 standardization efforts bringing us back to 0 support.

So then we started talking about some open source projects we use and I started thinking how the whole reason we use Open Source products is because of the ease of customization and the way these things in general seem to be supported. Once an add-on has enough support, it becomes integrated into the original baseline. I suspect tabs in Mozilla's browser were like this and I suspect that mouse gestures will be added as well someday.

So with that I noted that there are so many open source products that I use right out of the box and they are exactly how I want them. Its the adaptive nature of OSS and how it changes with the users needs. Still it must be noted that for me the whole reason I got into OSS was because of customization an such, but now as I said, everything is right out of the box.

I thought it was interesting. Especially the part about working with MS Dev tools and feeling like I stepped back in time to Windows 3.1. Its so crazy.