Another reason I love open source software

This weekend I was reminded of another reason that I love open source software: A transparent development process. Only in open source software will you be able to talk directly to the developers of a software project and give them your input. This is one of the reasons that open source projects tend to focus specifically on the requirements of the users. Let me tell you my story...


I recently discovered a young open source project called ZipTie. ZipTie is a network management application that allows you discover and manage the devices on your network. I am always interested in open source network management applications, so I decided to test out ZipTie on our network.

I first tried running ZipTie on Ubuntu, but I ran into some errors, which I posted on the forum. A developer quickly replied and asked me to test it again with a different setting. I made the change but the problem still existed. Then the developer suggested a work-around to get me going until they could find the root cause of the errors. His work-around did the trick, and it allowed me to successfully discover all of my network devices. Here is the bug-report I submitted, which will allow the developers to keep track of this issue and inform me when the problem is fixed.

Next, I decided to test out how well ZipTie worked on Windows Vista. I am happy to report that the application ran almost perfectly on the Windows platform. I did notice one inconsistency when I compared it to how it ran on Ubuntu, so I told the developers about it on the ZipTie IRC channel. Within minutes, they had found the problem and fixed it in the next version.

Every time I have contacted the ZipTie developers, they have been super friendly and responsive. They have even asked me about which features I would like to see in future versions of ZipTie, which they publish in their roadmap.

As it turns out, the ZipTie project is in a unique position for a young open source project. I have learned that the parent company, AlterPoint, is allocating 4.5 employees to work on the ZipTie project. Considering that most open source projects start with a single part-time developer, you can see how this project has a huge jump start! The ZipTie project is only 9 months old (November, 2006), but in that short amount of time they have managed to create some good quality code.

I am excited about the future of ZipTie, and I want to encourage the creation of a thriving community around this project. If you are interested in network management, please download ZipTie and test it out on your network. If you like what you see (and you probably will) then you should become a member of the community. You can do this by reporting bugs, writing documentation, testing new versions, answering questions in the forum, submitting feature requests to the developers, and much more. It feels good to participate in an open source community, and sometimes I even call it fun!

Comments

  1. Anonymous7/04/2007 3:09 AM

    Well looks like the parent company must be paying them big bucks to be 'responsive'. I wish more of us open source developers had it made like that (instead of looking for pizza boxes with leftovers :D). Anyways sounds promising, I'll try this out. Stumbled here while looking for free discovery tools. Thanks for the review

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