I imagine that I'm not as fanatical as some about whether licenses are open source, GPL, FSF, whatever. Truth be told, I don't pay much attention to it. I use software I need, buy what I have to, hack what I can.

Perhaps as a good netizen and Libertarian, I should be more concerned about the issue. But, in reference to what antihec said, I think there is a fairly close to zero relationship to modifying source and an unhappy Abigail. I consider my self a reasonably competent programmer. I've been doing this stuff for over 20 years, in one area or another. I'm even OK at Perl. Hardly a merlyn or a vroom, but I know how to RTFM, and how to get stuff working. (Ovid helps me with regexps... <G>)

But, for saying that, it doesn't mean I'm qualified or can afford the time or emotional effort to go get the source for Everything, figure out what environments it needs, how to install it, what the model is, make changes to suit my fancy, test it, and have those changes accepted by the powers that be. Fact is, there is more to changing open source software than just grabbing code and hacking.

I'd love to make some meaningful changes to Everything (more aptly, the PM site). Nothing special, just a few things that people have talked about, whatever. But it doesn't mean it's what vroom and company want. It doesn't mean it's what you, the user, wants. And supposing I did make the changes, do vroom and company have time to test and deploy those changes?

There's a substantial difference between making changes/hacks to software you're going to run at home (your own PM site? A kernel mode driver? Some small utility?) than there is to a product that other people are publically using.

Abigail may be a well known Perl coder. I've heard the name before. I know her attitude was, at best, combative. But it doesn't mean that she has the time, skill, or energy to just pick up a fairly large code ball, and make changes that suit her.

I'm all for open source, free software, yada yada yada. But there are some levels of practicality that just aren't there. In my book, this is one of them.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren