drupal, like any software package, has flaws that need to be fixed. with a commercial product, however, someone is responsible for seeing that problems are addressed and the customers are kept happy. because OS has no customers, and no company per se (something i think is great, in general), the pressure to keep anyone happy is missing. the various module suppliers are the ones responsible for customer service -- and frankly, most of them could appear to give a rat's ass.

massmailer, for example, has a bug. it's a little bug, but it's affected a few people, including a guy named John Jonas, who, being a php programmer, spent a few hours looking at the code and finding the problem. one line of one file was missing 2 periods, and with that taken care of, MM worked for him -- and for me. (of course, i've reported this bug appropriately.)

the point is that this problem has existed, it's been reported, and it took an outsider to find the bug. meanwhile, people keep trying to use MM because the drupal "community" says how wonderful drupal is, how superior OS is to commercial ware, how responsive people are to your problems, bla bla bla. except problems go on and on, and if a developer feels like fixing the problem, great; if not, tough. newbies are made to feel like idiots, and if unlike me you don't have a programmer pal to turn to, you'll waste hours and weeks on something you are told is a brilliant solution -- that fails.

if the drupal community really does care about OS and this program in particular, they'll stop treating the problems in drupal as annoyances. it's time to grow up and take responsibility. if your module is causing people problems, don't just roll your eyes and wait for them to give up or be helped by a kind stranger. it's your module; you fix it. if you toss a module out into the world, you own it. you dont' get to make excuses. you get to make it work. the longer drupal goes on being this unfriendly, the more likely other options will take its place. that would be a pity. but if people have to spend 2 weeks trying to get one module to work -- and i'm not talking about MM; it's just the latest in a too-long line of frustrations -- then they are going to decide that time might as well be spent on another web development solution that may require learning time, but at least it won't be drupal anymore.

anyone thinks i'm kidding has not paid attention to the way people are bailing on IE. it could happen to drupal.

Comments

therave’s picture

The first is that this is not an issue that is completely unique to OSS/Drupal - it seems to me that what you're experiencing is the classic Rate of Change VS. Stability tradeoff that has been an issue with computer software since its beginning. Most of us have used Beta software in order to be able to use the latest features now - we make a deliberate choice to trade stability for having something right now, and that is something that closed source has done many times in the past. The difference from Drupal, of course, is that you couldn't look at the source and realise that it was only two periods that was causing the bug that you're experiencing.

Drupal (to me anyway) has the feel of a system (actually, as community-driven software, it's almost an ecosystem!) that is growing and maturing extremely quickly. This means that it will exhibit, particularly in the non-core modules, the pains of that rapid growth. This doesn't excuse the issues, but to compare Drupal with software of much greater maturity (Windows is 20 years old, etc) and find it wanting is a perhaps little unfair.

The second thought is you need to understand that Open-Source Software is essentially and fundamentally Darwinian (again the Ecosystem analogy). It throws up a myriad of projects and sub-projects, all competing for a fixed amount of resources (coders, testers, users) and which succeed or fail on their ability to attract and keep hold of those resources. In other words, for every successful project there are some with just enough resource to tick-over, and many that fail (stall) completely. By the very nature of the beast, therefore, you will see a number of projects that have stopped, or are stopping development. The bottom line is that if enough people were interested to be involved in a project, as users, testers and developers, the module would be fixed.

Having said all that, there does seem to be some sentiment in the developer mailing list that there are a lot of patches building up that have not been reviewed and applied. If this was the case, this could be a problem for Drupal - an artificial bottleneck that is restraining the ability of projects to make the most of their limited resources.


David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

First of all, I recommend a reality check. Just in case.
Second, that massmailer bug only did occur for people that run mysql on a non-standard port. All other users didn't have any problems related. The big was actually fixed in the cvs version that is shipped with CivicSpace, but I forgot to backport the fix. Too bad.

What is your point again? Complaining about a free product? Seems a bit pointless. Maybe you should study the waranty before you purchase...
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services

drewish’s picture

i'm not going to say that open source is perfect. there are plenty of maintainers that work on something until it meets their needs and then just walk off and leave it. the upside of open source is that you (or someone you hire) can pick it up, dust it off and get it to do what you need it to do.

consider the alternative, you pay money for a CMS and then find out that it has lots of bug that the developers have known about for years and ignored. what are you going to do? you've already paid for it, it's up and running with your data, so your tied in. maybe you'll be lucky and have a copy of the source so you could hire someone to fix the bugs.

so sure, it could be better but heck, it's not like drupal cost you anything. and what about that bug you referred to? it looks like it's been fixed and closed a little more than an hour after you reported it. how is that un-responsive?

Brian@brianpuccio.net’s picture

You seem to think there is some sort of obligation, that someone or some group of people owe you, or others, something. I think you are mistaken. You state that the pressure to keep anyone happy is missing. If I were a developer and you told me that I was in any shape, way or form obligated to do anything for you with software I wrote in my own spare time, I'd probably respond quite nastily.

The fact of the matter is, if you start placing any sort of obligations on those who volunteer, less people will volunteer. The people who have made Drupal what it is didn't do it for you, they did it for themselves. (The exception being sponsered development.) I consider myself lucky that they happen to be king enough to let the rest of the world use the result of their work for free. I'd hate to have to re-invent the wheel that is Drupal.

You find this to be a lame excuse, but to be honest, they don't have an obligation to explain or justify anything to you either. Your sense of entitlement is just a bit much.

mayhem-1’s picture

Just a thought here, not necessary about drupal per se. I've used commercial products before, and can only say that even commercial products do not necessary fix any bugs you report, until the next version release. For example, I was using this very popular commercial Learning Management system and paying them tens of thousands of dollars each year for very minimal functionalities, and when one of these (an instant messaging module) had a bug, reporting it didnt got it fixed. I've seen better responses from open source community (drupal, moodle etc) than commercial stuffs.

therave’s picture

You're absolutely right. In an example from my own experience, we were using Rational Rose (which cost a figure well into the thousands of pounds) to perform round trip engineering between our model and our Java code - UML Class diagrams to Java code and back.

When Java introduced assertions in version 1.4 Sun provided plenty of warning of the language changes. None-the-less, Rose couldn't support it, which broke the parsing of Java code back into the model and reduced the software to a very expensive paperweight.

After a number of months, Rational introduced a workaround patch, which unfortunately didn't work at all with the particular way in which we were using the language statement, so it was either rewrite our code to be less useful or continue without Rose. We chose the latter.

I checked for fixes for about 18 months, but nothing. They were aware of the problem - just didn't fix it. As far as I know, they never did.

Rather puts you off expensive closed-source solutions - it certainly did me.


David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/

SimonP’s picture

Exactly - the point is that because drupal is open source, if you do find a bug in the way it works in your particular set-up (or want to change the way it behaves) you are legally able to change the code. Or (shock, horror) you can pay somebody to change it for you.

If it was a proprietry, closed-source program then you'd be stuck at the whim of the developer as to whether they deemed your issue important enough to do anything about (as in the examples given here).

Personally, I don't think we should make a big deal of the fact that drupal is free because people such as Mr. Barnhart tend not to value anything they can't put a price on. And the fact that it is free tends to make some people immediately think it cannot be very good and they ought to complain.

Thanks

Simon

====
Back in the UK after discovering drupal during temporary residence of Vancouver

Zach Harkey’s picture

Keep in mind, when you denigrate the "drupal community" as a whole like this, you also disparage all the kind, helpful and responsive people who have gone out of their way to help you. People like John Jonas.

: z

t.a. barnhart’s picture

i thanked him first & personally. and i passed his link along with the bug report.

Brigadier’s picture

You obviously have no idea what it's like to write software. Anyone who contributes a module (to any OS project) does so because they feel like giving something back or they are oblidged to share modifications under GPL or a similar license. They don't agree to any kind of contract that says they're going to do any kind of testing or figure out how to fix a bug that's a problem for you. If it's that big a problem for you then you can fix it. That's how Open Source works. Then people can come to you and complain about the solution that you gave them for free.

Statements like yours encourage developers to keep their modifications private just to avoid the hassle of dealing with your unrealistic expectations.

jxs2151’s picture

I think you guys can safely ignore Mr. Barnhart. A quick googling reveals him to be a angry little man who complains about pretty much everything. Some people just seem to get stuck in whine mode.

His own posts on drupal forums show him to be doing Drupal work for pay, making money off of a free product and then complaining when things don't work exactly how he wants them to.

Developers: Thank you for the work you do. I appreciate whatever I get.

Souvent22’s picture

It's funny that I read this right after I just submitted a patch for a module. I made refinement to a module (in particular the contact_dir module, gave it the ability to import CSV contacts from outlook, yahoo, etc.). Now, does this module work for me? Yes. Is it buggy? Prob. but I posted it to help others. I did it in my spare time. I gave it of free will. I don't mind those who point out bugs, and ASK for them to be fixed. I can't stand those who DEMAND that they be fixed. I'm grateful to have such a great starting base. In reality, most software is a starting base. That's why even MS Office has VBA and Macro's to extend the software and make it do what you want. Hell, Quick Books is extendable. You think Peoplesoft comes out of the box ready-to-use? I understand your frustration, but come on! I'm rambling now. I guess the best thing to do to this thread would be to ignore it. (I applaude all those who contribute to drupal. From programmers to graphic designers making themes/css. This is one of the smoothes OSS communites I've been apart of. )

SimonP’s picture

"....you'll waste hours and weeks on something you are told is a brilliant solution -- that fails."

The point is that YOU have to decide if its a brilliant solution in YOUR situation. Just taking somebody else's word about something being a brilliant solution is going to lead you into all sorts of problems in finance, housing, politics.....

Either that, or get a consultant to make a brilliant decision on your behalf so that if it all goes wrong you can sue them.

====
Back in the UK after discovering drupal during temporary residence of Vancouver

nsk’s picture

The user is obliged to donate money or time to free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) developers who created the wonderful free software they (singular they) use, or to join the community and help with development or documentation, or even supporting other users.

The developer is obliged to try to help the users as much as they can, but they aren't obliged to actually help them. This means that when a FLOSS programmer receives a report of a new bug, they should have a quick look and then check their calendar and see whether they have time to fix it or not, and then consider how much time and effort they are willing to donate for free. If they enjoy their project, and if their calendar is empty, then they should fix the bug. If their calendar is full and they don't have time, they don't have to fix the bug; they can assign the fix to another programmer or inform the users that they don't have time. A FLOSS developer can ask for money or other kind of donations (e.g. code) in case they need it. However, this doesn't mean that a developer who do gets satisfaction from their FLOSS project should request money to fix bugs when their calendar is empty and they do have free time and energy, as well as the knowledge, to fix it (this behaviour would be profit-seeking, not to say that profit is necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can destroy FLOSS communities).

So, in the end, the user is the person who is actually obliged, not the developer. After the user resolves their obligation, either by donating money or participating in the community (through giving support to other users or contributing code), then they can discuss the developer's obligations, if there are any.

However, we should recognise two truths:

1) Closed-source software is still not defeated, and the FLOSS developers who feel that closed-source is unethical should try to do as much as they can to promote FLOSS and help it to become more widespread. In order to do this they have to keep the users happy, id est to implement cool new features, fix bugs, and provide support. However, they have absolutely no obligation to do this. If they do it, it is a gift and a service to the FLOSS community, not the fulfilment of an obligation of any kind, and those who perform this service should be considered heroes.

2) A very small amount of humans are capable and willing to creating science, technology, and what we call civilisation. Everyone can use science, technology, and civilisation, but very few can invent new things. In computing, there are many users and a few developers, who either by working for closed-source companies or donating their time and their energy to FLOSS projects they create the software that allows our computers to work. Knowing this, a FLOSS developer can choose to work hard for creating great FLOSS software to let people enjoy their computers, but if they do that, then it is a gift to humanity and not the fulfilment of an obligation of any kind, and of course those who do that should be considered heroic programmers.

To draw a parallel, we can think about doctors and patients. Are doctors obliged to help patients that cannot pay? I believe that doctors should help patients who cannot pay, at least in emergency situations, because otherwise the patient may die, and we cannot create life. Of course in such a situation the patient should "pay" their debt later, either by paying the doctor at a later date or by helping them in some other way. However, programmers are not doctors, and I believe that most computer users have the capability to learn to write basic software, therefore I don't think that a programmer has the moral obligation to help a user for free.

There is however the situation where a user becomes a programmer in FLOSS communities. In that case as a user they may have used a lot of FLOSS code in the past, and benefited from it (sometimes even commercially or monetary). If they can't help these particular FLOSS projects they used (exempli gratia the software they used may be written in Scheme but they may only know Pascal), then I think that they have a moral obligation to help the FLOSS movement in general, for example by writing their own FLOSS code for another project, or even starting their own projects if they can.

In general, if you receive more than what you give, then you have some obligation to give, but nobody should expect you to give forever without receiving anything in return, although some people may enjoy doing so for various reasons.

--
NSK, Founder of the Wikinerds Community. See my Drupal site, the Wikinerds Portal.

t.a. barnhart’s picture

one of the things i've done over the years, besides volunteering, is coordinate volunteers. people belong to a group or a project, and they say, "yes i'll help, just call me" and 1) every time you call, they've got a pressing commitment, sorry next time or 2) they say yes and then blow you off on the day.

these are volunteers. they get paid nothing, so they really owe nothing, right? if they show up, i should just be awfully glad and thankful, even if they are late, do half-ass work, or bug off early (and believe me, i've had all of that, along with many who work hard & often).

same with OS. if someone says "here you go, here's my module" and then it fails -- i should be glad for an usuable product because it's free? i'm not doing commercial websites; i'm doing one for my county democratic party, another for the deaniacs, one for my high school class of 1975, one for the high school band, another for a friend, a few as personal projects. i put a ton of time into these things, and i do them for free. there are people counting on me on some of these. if our group needs a good mailing list, and i check drupal and find one that claims to be good, and then i commit to the group based on that ... and it fails? i am to be grateful because it's free?

i've spent a lot of hours doing my part: learning drupal, learning php mysql. i've done it on my own for the most part, with some help from a friend, and i've done it despite not being a programmer. my skills are quite different from that to do effetive work with php, but still i try. i've learned how to install db tables when the module fails to do so. i've learned how to search the forums, the helps, other sites; i do my share. all i ask in return is 2 things. 1, module developers being too busy, bored, irritated or distracted to fix what they put on the (free) market, and 2, to see the drupal community take a more mature commitment to their projects. being free and OS, like i said, is a sucky excuse. all excuses are sucky.

patrickharris’s picture

"I've done my part"? You make it sound like some contract was entered into.
Drupal can be extremely frustrating, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't work for you, I'm afraid there's no point looking for someone to blame.

jxs2151’s picture

I find it interesting that in the above post you state:

"i'm not doing commercial websites"

Yet in this post you mention:

"..and considering this is for a paying client, i am not very happy"

Which is it?

There are givers and there are takers in this world.

jxs2151’s picture

I just happened to notice that nowhere in your list of "I do my part" items is there an item which has you giving something back to the community. Everything item in your list has something you "do" that benefits only you and your projects.

I fail to see where your contribution to the Drupal community is anything other than irritating and distracting the developers.

rbrooks00’s picture

It seems that you are really trying to pass the buck on the issues you are having here along to the developers for the mass mailer module. I haven't seen the exact bug that you are referring to but someone made reference to the fact that it only occurs if you are running mySQL on a non-standard port and even then it only happens to a few users. This is hardly an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it bug and I would be highly surprised if a developer read it and said "man, I have to solve this tonight!" In fact I'd be interested to learn if there is any software company out there, open or closed source that would be incredibly responsive to such a trivial bug.

Furthermore, what are you expecting - a full QA department for Drupal? You got a few hundred thousand dollars to fund that effort? You found a bug and you were able to get it fixed in a matter of hours - what is the problem? Are you being indignant because you found *gasp* a bug in a software product? If this were a closed source product offered by say... Microsoft then you wouldn't have had any recourse except to report it and then I'm sure it would still be sitting there today unfixed.

I think you have a little bit of a warped vision of what open source is if you believe that it is equivalent to indentured servitude - it isn't. The people that create contributed modules aren't part of the Drupal project itself, you really should not the big disclaimer at the top of the page "The contributed modules are not part of any official release and may not work correctly."

To me that says pretty loudly that these modules aren't going to have world class support, they might have bugs and there is no guarantee they'd be fixed. If they work for you great, if not then you have to consider your options.

You as a user have plenty of options though:
1. You can hire someone to fix the bug and then submit a patch to get it back into the module. If it is that important to you then you shouldn't be making demands of a volunteer, you should pay someone to fix it. The patch process is pretty darn easy and can be found here: http://drupal.org/diffandpatch Talk is cheap, patches get the job done.

2. You could run your MySQL server on the standard port and lo and behold you'd have a work around.

3. You could opt not to use the massmailer/php list combo. Personally I hate it and have opted to use better products. They don't necessarily integrate with Drupal but in my specific instances that isn't really important either - I'd rather have features than integration. If this was really an issue for you then there are tons of other solutions out there.

If you make commitments to a group of people, whether it is you volunteering your time or a consulting gig it is your responsibility to deliver a working product for their needs not Drupal, nor the community. You might stand a chance of getting some help if you tried to work with developers and pleaded your case a little bit rather than going into attack mode.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Thank you for stepping up as our main quality assurance manager.
After you have worked yourself into Drupal, know its inside outs, we expect you to:
* know all the flaws.
* make sure developers are pointd to the most critical ones
* make sure the less critical are ket behind
* motivate developers to work for free for nagging 'customers'
* Make sure none of the over 400 contribs conflict or contain bugs
* Core keeps performing as well as it does now
* Be available to everyone in all timezones.

We really apreciate your effort.

---
if you dont like the choices being made for you, you should start making your own.
---
[Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com]

Thox’s picture

How often does this technique work? I've seen a few developers say it, and I can say that it wouldn't work on me at all. If anything, it makes me less willing to contribute.

I'm curious what the success rate of this attitude is.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

If you read closely you will see that no human being is capable of doing such a group.
ON reason is -indeed- the fact that you have to have skills to steer everyone without making them itchy and run away.

I meant it as a post saying: If you dont like how it is done now, you must help. not rant. Demanding things is easy. Filling demands is near to impossible often.
---
if you dont like the choices being made for you, you should start making your own.
---
[Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com]

Toe’s picture

If anything, it makes me less willing to contribute.

It's certainly made *me* less willing to contribute...

Jaza’s picture

I agree with you that module developers need to take more responsibility for the long-term maintenance of their code. If someone reports a bug against a module, it should be fixed when the developer has time. I have disagreed before, and will disagree again, with other developers who say that Drupal has no 'customers', and that users do not deserve 'service' as such. We all want Drupal to succeed, and in order to do that I believe that users need to be nurtured.

However, your accusations are exaggerated, whiny, and inappropriate. Yes, modules should be maintained at a high standard. But no, this is not guaranteed, as indicated by the disclaimer at the top of the modules page. No, module developers are not paid for timely and efficient patching. They will fix their code when they have time. No, module developers cannot be expected to find every bug in their code. Users should report bugs, and should if at all possible submit patches with their reports.

From looking at your tracker, it seems that all you do around here is complain. If you want to have a better experience with Drupal, maybe you should start contributing something positive for a change.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

stevryn’s picture

whining lately? Open Source isnt an excuse, its a fact. This product is given freely, and is supported freely. It is NOT warrantied or guaranteed to fit everyones needs and wants. Its a collective effort of people with knowledge to share.

People should be THANKING the Drupal community for providing such a well supported CMS. Granted there are sometimes things that fall through cracks or arent taken care of as quickly as you hope, but enough already.

Every time I read a post such as this, its like listening to a spoiled child who is used to getting what they want all the time, anytime. Reality check, The people who have developed and supported this project and its contributed modules have LIVES..yes its true, they are not holed up in some dark room huddled over their keyboard just waiting for your problem to surface so they can fix it. Some of them probably even have **ouch** JOBS!!

Module contributions are given without a guarantee, as EXPRESSLY stated on the downloads page. If it doesnt work the way its supposed to, file a report, and wait your turn in the queue or HELP find a solution.

Perhaps if people whined less and helped find solutions, there would be more time to address issues, rather than having to deal with spoiled children.

okay..Im stepping down off my soapbox now...back to work on my issues :)

eaton’s picture

"I don't know enough PHP to fix it on my own" is a lame excuse as well.

This is not to say that people who don't know PHP shouldn't use Drupal. But they should also realize that -- like any other solution -- if they want to customize it beyond what it does out of the box they may quickly run into situations that require more knowledge than they have.

The recent flood of Anti-Drupal-Backlash seems to come from people who want Drupal to be something that it's not yet ready to be: completely bug-free, completely finished (with all the features everyone will ever want), and completely intuitive to new non-programmers. Those are all great things, saying, 'Sorry, we're not all of those things yet, at all' is hardly an excuse. It's a statement of fact.

Being angry about it will not change it. Posting patches will.

This, I think, is the crux of the 'Oh yeah? You try doing it!' responses that many active developers have. The people contributing to drupal aren't sitting around having lagers and congratulating themselves on their plans for world conquest. They're writing code, building sites, fixing bugs, and making improvements. Complaiing that they've worked on a different set of issues than the ones you want resolved isn't a great motivator for them.

If you want someone else to donate their time to you, to make a piece of free code work in your particular installation, telling them that they're lazy, and that they're making free software look bad, doesn't do much to help your cause. Your problem may still be important, but you've made it pretty certain that they will want to look at someone else's issue reports before yours.

--
Jeff Eaton | Click Here To Find Out Why Drupal "Sucks"

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram