Open Source Development and how NOT to do it

I'll admit: I'm part of the problem. I develop for ubercart, which is a fork of ecommerce. More about this later. But onto the soap-opera-drama in IRC this morning.

This has to do with yet another module that rszrama has decided to make on his own PM_lite, without any research of the APIs regarding privatemsg. Lets read the conversation....

IRC convo via pastebin: http://pastebin.com/f7a53b21a

So thats the recent drama. I'm not sure if the coding wombat's team have college certs or not (not saying that programmers need to have degrees per-se, but it helps) but thier complete lack of research, critical thinking, willingness to work with others (rather than having others work for him), all on top of a lack of basic software design ideas, and on top of that -- the fact that they think they're right and anything said to them is in-one-ear and out the other, is just sad.

Now that said, I started contributing to the ubercart project because last summer it appeared that drupal-ecommerce was dead. Hindsight is 20/20, but I needed an ecommerce package that worked and ubercart had the UI to get it done. That said, ubercart isn't going away anytime soon, and nor is my support for it. the ECv4 package has gone in a different direction: instead of being an out-of-box solution, its a framework for building eCommerce solutions on drupal. Its not for the faint of heart, and will require php/dev experience to work well, unlike ubercart. I think there is a lot of cleanup in ECv4 that could make it feature equivalent, but would probably never have the UI.

My eventual hope would be to see ubercart and ecommerce merge as one ecommerce package, and if they want to brand ubercart as a supported distro of ecommerce, great. They can share common payment, shipping, product, etc apis and add their own custom modules on top of that. This would bring harmony to ecommerce in drupal. I think I'll focus my efforts here, and who knows -- perhaps if others join on, we can make this happen.

But for now, ubercart is where I'm at. For such a dysfunctional group, the package seems to work fairly well. I'd like to see some good developers join on this effort, but as long as these 'wombats' are in command, it'll never happen. Stay tuned...