Open-sourceness and developers
The win-win situation created by the close relationship between open-source projects and web developers
In the application development scenario, open-source framework and applications such Node.js have been witnessing a constant growth in their popularity, and as a begginer/intermediate user on both backend and frontend technologies, I appreciate this very much. The use of such technologies brings possibilities and oportunities that don’t usually show up when we’re talking about their proprietary “competitors”.
If you’re a developer (not necessarily a web developer), you’ll certainly have come across the word “alternative workaround” a handful of times, and although it feels bad to resort to this kind of technique, sometimes we just need to, due to framework limitations and such. And the problem is even worse when it comes to proprietary software limitations, as we have absolutely no control over when updates are coming or what’s going to be covered by them.
And though we don’t have this control over open-source software as well (not completely), we are able to spot bugs and suggest (or even submit) solutions for them, as well as new features. This creates big, heavily active online communities around these systems, which work hard to familiarize new developers with the systems, and to constantly improve the platform. I have witnessed a good example of the hard work of those communities, when one of my co-workers at BlackBerry Tech Center Recife found a fault in the JSON parsing function in a WebWorks module. After we tried to find the problem ourselves to no avail, the issue was reported at WebWorks repository, and after some replies and emails, a solution was found.
In my opinion, every developer should, at some point, contribute to the open-source community. It is a wonderful way of gaining technical knowledge, knowing important people in the software development scene and realising the importance and the advantages that an active developer community offers.
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