Unless Karen Coombs is writing about some other reference statistics tracking package that has an (until recently) undocumented dependency on Pear::DB, her blog post calls out one of the (numerous) failings of Libstats: Installation is difficult for a lot of people. I get a lot of questions from people who have trouble with mod_rewrite or don’t know DB is required or various other things.

I’ve had similar negative experiences with open-source software, and actually releasing something gave me a much better understanding of why things wind up like this.

A few years ago, our library decided to write a reference tracking system and pilot it at a few libraries across campus. Since I was, then, the only developer at our library, the task fell to me. Once the system had proven successful at Madison, I thought, “Hey, maybe other people would like this, too.” I got the OK from my boss to release the code under an open-source license.

This, it turns out, is tricker than it might seem. All of those steps I’d fumbled through to make the software run, I had to eliminate, or at least explain, to people installing this software on the servers they have on hand. Databases need to be created and populated with initial data. Web servers need to be configured. Did I want to provide a demo? Screenshots? Big software projects provide installation wizards, but writing those is a bunch of work, and from my boss’s perspective, the software was written and done, and I had other projects to work on.

Then, there were concerns over the quality of the code. There’s some ugly shit in there. Did I really want people looking at that, and pointing and laughing? What if there’s a security bug in the code that could compromise someone’s server? Even if it relies on server misconfiguration, I’d feel pretty lousy if my code got someone hacked. How will people find out about, obtain, and install patches? Seriously, I wondered, is it even worth the work it’s gonna take to release this code?

Finally, I decided that it was worth the work, and that I’d release it, warts and all, in the hopes that it would be useful to some people. In the time since then, I’ve realized that the motivations of an open-source developer are different from that of a commercial project manager. I don’t get any reward from wide adoption, except a warm fuzzy feeling inside and possibly bragging rights if I make something exceptionally neat.

The bottom line: There’s a large cost and a limited benefit to making an open-source project into an open-source product, and that work will never ever happen as long as the project is only used internally — it’s not needed.

Here’s the question, then: Is it better to release something half-baked, in the hopes that it will be useful, or to keep it purely internal and let someone else solve the problem?

(On the particular topic of not documenting the Pear::DB requirement: when Libstats was released, DB was part of the standard PHP install, so this wasn’t a common issue. Reworking the code to use Pear::MDB is the right option, but that’s nontrivial.)

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