Who Can You Count On During Crunch Time? Turns Out... Nobody.

I've long depended on the software community to save my butt in times of need. And it used to.

It stopped helping this week, and instead started wrecking havoc.

You'll notice I did not say the open source community. And I did not say the Java community. Even tho these two communities are the ones that my latest rant is aimed at. No... this issue has already burned me big time with commercial companies, which is why I left the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. But now I'm not sitting any better... everyone has sunk to the same level of mediocrity.

Bugs now are being reported, exhaustively, patched and submitted to release managers. And yet months, even years go by without so much as a cursory review. A few good examples come to mind... there were fairly blatant bugs, even typos in a Hibernate dialect for the H2 RDBMS. The author of H2 reported the bug, patched it and even made unit tests for the project. Has the fix even seen daylight? No. It has been open since July of 2008.

Here's an even worse example: thousands (if not millions) of people rely on Apache's Commons Codec library. It's used for string matching, BASE64 encoding and a slew of other things. One of the speech codecs suffers from an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception during encoding. A simple mistake to remedy, and one that was remedied and committed to their source repository. Was such an obvious bug ever fixed in a production release? No. In fact, a new release hasn't been made in five years.

And some of the bugs are bad because the maintainers refuse to fix them and label them as a feature. For example, does Spring's Hibernate DAO framework actually begin a transaction when you call... say... beginTransaction()? Nope, beginTransaction is a do-nothing operation. Wow, that makes things easy to troubleshoot and fix.

Okay, so far I've described problems that all have ready work-arounds. That's the only saving grace in these instances - the projects are open-source and so fixes can be applied and binaries re-built. But do you really want patched, out-of-band libraries going into your production system? And what about when you hit the really big problems nary days before the "big release," like finding a fatal, obvious and unfixed bug in your JMS broker? It's been crunch time for two weeks, you're already sleep deprived, your code is absolutely going out in two days... are you going to make a gentle post on the dev list after unit testing a thoroughly researched patch for an obvious bug the maintainers missed? No. You're going to punch the laptop.

Basically I've succumbed to the entropy and decay of all the frameworks I used to depend on. Hibernate Core has over 1500 bugs that have yet to be assigned a release or triaged and doesn't even appear to be actively maintained anymore. Commons Codec hasn't seen a release since July of 2004... kids born during their last release are headed towards elementary school. And the instability of ActiveMQ 5.1 continues to plague its 5.2 release.

The standard reaction to this kind of rant is "if you don't like it, why don't you submit patches?" "Why don't you join the project and help out?" "Stop complaining and contribute!" Yet contributions have been made, entire bugs have been fixed by others MONTHS ago, and yet there addition to the project has netted nothing. What hope is there for a sleep-deprived guy like myself to contribute before his project goes down in flames and the powers that be bail on these frameworks for the rest of their collective careers?