I know, I know. Defending open source is like jumping on the bandwagon when the train has already reached its destination.

Ever since I know of it, I’ve been in favor of Open Source: because the principle is nice, because it works, because it’s often free as in beer.

But once in a while I’m sharply reminded of why it is a GOOD thing. Today,for instance, when i spent the whole effing day debugging an application that used a closed source library with very unclear exception handling.

So the first few hours were spent on trial-and-mostly-error on the black box. Very, very tedious. Then I decompiled the darn thing, obfuscation and all, and tried to figure out where the problem was. Of course, the library was a signed jar, so recompiling for better debugging was not an option. S** of a b***. Pardon my french. I’ll continue to work on it tomorrow.

Open source is more than a nice principle. For development, it’s just plain easier – to debug, to include those nifty features you’d really like to have, to understand what exactly your code is doing.

And if a company can’t understand that, then I’ll try to avoid their software.

And if I can’t avoid it, well, may their managers suffer of bad itch in embarrassing places for every minute i lose.

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