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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Sandeen who wrote (1097)	9/9/1999 12:31:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Respond to of 1794

Thanks for the link, Eric (Sandeen). I enjoyed reading CatB again. I have been through a similar experience recently by starting my own Free software project for the Palm Pilot. It began with a frustration about a feature that was lacking in a commercial program, called BugMe! (http://www.hausofmaus.com/). I've never had very good response from commercial devlopers to my feature requests, so this time I decided that I would just write a clone program that did the same thing, but had my desired features. I called the clone "DiddleBug", and you can find it at blevins.simplenet.com After writing this program, I decided to release it under an open license (GPL) and hopefully some other people might enjoy it also. I was unprepared for the response. The program became wildly popular and has had over 25000 downloads to date, after being released for just 2-3 months. I began receiving bug reports via email, sometimes accompanied by patches to fix those bugs. People would give me good ideas for features to add. Some would even do the coding for these features themselves, and I would incorporate it into the main distribution. Several people wrote extra support programs that allowed you to view the DiddleBug data on Windows or Linux desktops. Voluteers offered to translate the program, and it is now available in Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and German. I actually had too many volunteers and had to choose between who got to translate the program. DiddleBug developed rapidly, sometimes with 2-3 releases a week. It has been very rewarding to me, allowing me to learn programming for the PalmPilot (I'm still not very good). I also get at least 5 emails every day just to thank me for writing the program, even though much of the work was done by other people. :) I have been in touch with the developer for the commercial competitor for DiddleBug, and he is not very pleased with its success. He lamented that his mistake was that he did not release often enough to get feedback. Of course, the quality of feekback goes down drastically if you hide your source code from interested parties, and only allow feedback from registered, paying customers. Just a personal testimonial that this style of software development actually works. -Mitch