Caleb Cushing's Blog Also known as XenoTerraCide
Posts with the tag unpopular opinion:

I wish my would go away

I been thinking about it for a few days, and of course consider I know nothing about grammar parsing or how any of this works. I wish the my $var; syntax would go away… or at least be less necessary. In almost all cases you want a lexical variable and use strict; doesn’t allow you to use $var anyways. So what’d I’d like to see is my become a mostly unnecessary reserved word, make $var a lexical variable by default, e.

please don't use Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::USERNAME

or create them. Here’s the problem…. (short version is Don’t put PodSpellingTests in them)normally you’d have[pluginA][pluginB][pluginC][pluginXTests][pluginYTests][pluginZTests]and one of them doesn’t work on your system (for whatever reason), well you can just do this.[pluginA][pluginB][pluginC];[pluginXTests][pluginYTests][pluginZTests]the ;is a comment in ini, now dzil won’t use that plugin. But people will say well you don’t want to do that of course I want that plugin enabled. Here’s why you may not temporarily. Casual user X has a bug in /your/ module that’s using dzil, they code up a patch, and they want to run your test suite.

Selling Open Source Software (specifically games)

This is a pseudo reply to Jason Calacanis for what he said about using an Open Source game engine to build a game in This Week in Startups #54, Ask Jason segment. I believe Jason is implying that you can’t make money with open source software(that’s not a support contract variant) directly, but it’s a good resume builder. True there aren’t any big billion dollar open source companies, and companies like Red Hat make money off support, but I don’t believe he’s correct.

That's not what I'm saying

people seem to think that I’m saying support should be a #1 priority. will someone please cite where I said that? yes I said it should be a priority, I said you should do it. I did not say where on the list it should fall. Even if you’re an employee at a company making $100k a year, if you’re wife is dying, your priority is that, hopefully your children come before said company in most cases too.

Warranties, what do they have to do with anything?

so the whole ‘open source’ has no warranty thing keeps coming up as a defensible reason that I’m wrong.Microsoft offers a 90 day limited warranty that the software will work to some degree or another as advertised or some such. If you really want to consider what they’re saying… it should work if it doesn’t we can send you another disk or you can return for refund. which really is what you could have done at the store anyways.

of Volunteers and Work

So, I’m heavily criticized for my unpopular opinion that open source volunteering is a job. I would like to point out the definitions of Volunteer and Work from answers.comI have removed a few irrelevant definitions, like those of ‘botany’.volunteern.A person who performs or offers to perform a service voluntarily: an information booth staffed by volunteers; hospital volunteers.Law.A person who renders aid, performs a service, or assumes an obligation voluntarily.v., -teered, -teerĀ·ing, -teers.