False alarm! This paper is not about barriers in actually working with open source, but largely about what I would call "barriers a newcomer faces in their quest to be accepted as an esteemed contributor or maintainer, with their name stamped the project, and their changes in the official trunk 'n everything!".
If an OSS program is not doing something that you would like, you can get the code and fix it. No waiting for anyone's response, no mentorship, no B.S. Moreover, you can publish your patch somewhere without upstreaming it to the original project.
I have recently done this with three programs: rsyslog, the Lurker mailing list archiver, and a MIDI sequencer for Windows called Sekaiju. I made these programs do what I want, and put my changes in public git repos hosted on my server.
Speaking of Lurker: I developed a way to show HTML mailing list posts as actual HTML in the web archive. The Lurker maintainer was vehemently against this on security grounds (even though I implemented a HTML filter which validates for a set of allowed tags and attributes.) The feature needs more work: namely, image links do not work properly. You can see images as attachments (existing feature), but the links within the HTML to the images are broken: they are the original URL's which need to be re-written to point to the archiver-generated URL's. This could be done in the "HTML cleaner", which is an external program hosted here, not originating from Lurker:
If an OSS program is not doing something that you would like, you can get the code and fix it. No waiting for anyone's response, no mentorship, no B.S. Moreover, you can publish your patch somewhere without upstreaming it to the original project.
I have recently done this with three programs: rsyslog, the Lurker mailing list archiver, and a MIDI sequencer for Windows called Sekaiju. I made these programs do what I want, and put my changes in public git repos hosted on my server.
Speaking of Lurker: I developed a way to show HTML mailing list posts as actual HTML in the web archive. The Lurker maintainer was vehemently against this on security grounds (even though I implemented a HTML filter which validates for a set of allowed tags and attributes.) The feature needs more work: namely, image links do not work properly. You can see images as attachments (existing feature), but the links within the HTML to the images are broken: they are the original URL's which need to be re-written to point to the archiver-generated URL's. This could be done in the "HTML cleaner", which is an external program hosted here, not originating from Lurker:
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/
My Lurker fork is hosted here:
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/