Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Software For You
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
As of this week, Miro 1.0 is out. Miro is a neat program that lets you download YouTube and Google Video clips to your hard drive so you can watch them whenever you want. You can also use it to subscribe to video podcasts like the TED talks, a PBS kids' show, Google Tech Talks, a cooking show, or a zillion others.
For a few months this summer, I did testing for Miro and updated the channel guide. I'm going to do more of that before the year is out. In fact, my goal is to learn enough Python to submit at least one patch by December 31st. So far, one of the best compliments I've gotten this year is, upon submitting a bug report, being told "good catch".
Open source is more open when people can capably and freely move from being users to being contributors. I want to contribute to Miro to help others and to help myself. Mel makes an interesting point about the face-saving culture; I am trying to gain cred so that I have a reputation to protect in the future.
Comments
Michael Gorsuch
http://www.styledbits.com
14 Nov 2007, 12:58 p.m.
I've really enjoyed your last two posts (this one and "medium-term plans"). Keep writing.
Thank you for sharing Mel's post; I've never really thought of this problem with Open Source, even though it has been surrounding me for the last 10 years or so. It makes so much sense - 'ask forgiveness, not permission' is a very difficult thing for most of us (myself often included), and this is a necessary trait that the philosophers of Open Source may not be paying enough attention to or are taking for granted.