Recently Fedora developer and all-around good gal Máirín Duffy has been working on what she calls “The Fundamental Theorem of Developing FLOSS“. Inspired by what she called “opinionated non-doers”, this is an attempt to catalogue the sorts of behaviors a FLOSS developer should expect. Most of the entries revolve around change, particularly the addition or removal of features.

This isn’t some “those damn lusers” screed. Instead, Máirín offers a fairly objective summary of the experience of her and others. It’s a rather useful, if cynical, checklist of the kinds of feedback a developer might expect when introducing a change. Knowing what will happen in advance allows a project to better communicate the reasoning and impacts for a change (though the Axiom of Assuming the Worst would suggest this is a futile effort).

If I were to claim any beef with the theorem as it currently exists, it would be the Axiom of Ignoring the Source. It’s not that it’s wrong, necessarily, but that it’s incomplete. There are certainly those who are capable of reading the source, making changes, and submitting those change and yet decide not to. Sometimes it’s laziness, sometimes there are other reasons.

But there are a lot of people, and I would generally count myself among them, who lack the ability to understand the source or to make the changes I want. I think we, as various open source communities, often assume the hypothetical user is as knowledgeable as the developer and forget about the non-developer users. “Whining in an online forum” is often as much as someone can do (though it’s certainly not a productive way of expressing discontent). I’d also argue that access to source is not “the entire point” of FLOSS, but instead a means to an end. That’s more of a semantic quibble than any actual disagreement.

I suspect there’s a Fundamental Theorem of Using FLOSS to be written that is the user perspective of some of the same issues.