Saturday, August 02, 2008

Essential Motivation in Free Software

Being really tired to code anything on a Friday evening while the TV tries to force me to watch Dick Tracy in vain, I decided to do a web search on reviews about SpeedCrunch.

I was surprised with the amount of recent articles about 0.10.1, complete with screenshots and non-copied-and-pasted text. I quickly found some 20 posts, and that was just looking for pages in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Articles in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are quite common for some time (thank you everybody responsible for that!), but today I got really touched when I found a very nice page with a review from someone from Portugal for the first time. The feeling is even bigger when one lives outside the home country.

I haven't found a review saying SpeedCrunch essentially sucks so far, and the opinions are actually VERY favorable. On top of that, readers often comment on those pages thanking for the divulgation of such great alternative free software. The voting score is also generally the highest possible.

So in addition to blogs, some of the websites were software aggregators that actually host the application files (they don't just link to our download page). That was when I found out by summing the few that I visited, that I could add at least 10 000 downloads to our counter (which is currently around 22 000, just for both Windows options). Well, considering all the websites that I didn't visit, and that every download eventually results, in average, in the sharing with the whole family / friends / office mates / class mates / you-name-it-group-of-people, I truly believe that the current amount of users (again, just for the Windows versions) can be, at the very least, 100 000.

Since SpeedCrunch is also available on almost all the most popular Linux distributions, and especially considering that it is shipped as the default desktop calculator in Kubuntu, the total number of users is probably extremely interesting for a project that started only as a toy and a proof of concept, and has always been a 1-2 active men project (active as in when the rare spare time after the real job and private life allows). The recent recovered support for the OSX platform also contributed for the increase of total official downloads, which surprised me a lot, to be honest.

Finally, it's also very gratifying to read Wikipedia pages mentioning our beloved pet project, on articles like division by zero and arbitrary-precision arithmetic. All of these factors are quite important in order to keep the motivation levels high and refuse to stop improving the project because nobody really uses it or really cares.

It's fairly easy to start a free software project, but maintaining it is a hell of a trip. On activity peak times, you can't just stop coding until you reach a certain satisfactory level of features and stability. After that period, you run out of ideas and free time. So people suddenly come to you and complain about bugs or features that MUST be there, otherwise the product is useless and the author a jerk. This can easily lead to the extinction of projects, which is probably the most common destiny of them all anyway.

Developers must then learn how to ignore destructive comments and incentivate constructive ones, instead of starting flame wars, stalling the project and wasting precious time. Feature suggestion and bug reporting are two essential and determinant factors that only the users can do, and will definitely contribute for the survival of a project. I imagine that if what has been happening with the KDE Plasma project lately happened with a "small", innocent and unpretentious SpeedCrunch, the application would probably have frozen in time. All because ingratitude and destructive positions send real contributers' motivation to the void.

So thank you for being there and keeping this project alive and kickin' :)

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, here's a much deserved pat on the back from a Speedcrunch user for the past two years!!! Thanks for all your hard work guys!!

Unknown said...

Hey -- Speedcrunch is awesome. I love the ease of use, it's painless to do many calculations.

I've got one feature request.. I know it's a hard one :)
Would it be possible for the history to remain 'active' so that if you realize you made an error in one calculation, you fix that one error in the history and the change trickles down to all the expressions that used that result afterwards?
(1 + 1 = 2;
Ans + 5 = 7;
Ans / 2 = 3.5; -- oh, crap, I meant 1 + 2 in the beginning! and it updates the results to 3, 8 and 4 respectively).

Helder Correia said...

@Trevoke: Thank you very much!

Regarding the feature, it is already planned, see task 204 in our tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/speedcrunch/issues/detail?id=204

Oh, please use either the tracker or the mailing list to propose features :)

James said...

I'd left Speedcrunch running over night so when I just logged in there it was and my first thought was "it's a thing of beauty".

I've used it for a while on Linux but installed it on Windows yesterday having never used it on Windows before.

Applications that are simple (in what it does not how it does it:-), small but very good are rare gems.

Anonymous said...

I've just discovered this project on lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5141945/speedcrunch-is-a-fast-and-keyboard-friendly-calculator) so you can expect to see some increase in the download volume.

Seems like a wonderful project - keep up the gr8 work.

Anonymous said...

I watched the videos for the 'new' calculator in Windows 7. It does look very suspiciously like SpeedCrunch. Maybe someone can take that program apart and make sure it isn't 'copying' the same routines as SpeedCrunch. I wouldn't be surprised if M$ actually had taken open-sourced code and integrated it into their proprietary products without permission (IE 8 using a lot of Firefox code and blatently ripping off ideas).

All that said, give it a v1.0 sometime so people take it seriously!

Anonymous said...

Hey, e^3 neither e3 doesn't work. You must fix that bug !!!

If you type e^3 in google, it works, but not in SpeedCrunch.

Helder Correia said...

@Anonymous: reading your second sentence, I get the impression that you haven't read this blog post at all... Anyway, that "bug" is fixed in the upcoming version for a long time, try 0.11-alpha.

rcrosado said...

Long time user here as well, on several platforms, and just found this post while looking for the link to the website to share with coleagues from work. Not a day go by when I don't use Speedcrunch, keep up the good work!