Last week, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky discussed open-sourcing Stack Overflow. This week, Micah Martin (of Coding Context) asked a Stack Overflow question about releasing his site, Wikipedia Maze, as Open Source.
Both had the fundamental question:
Should I release my code to the open-source community?
Short answer: Just releasing a project as Open Source is a mistake, for the same reason that handing a hungry man a fish is a mistake.
I’ve trolled SourceForge for years, but my interest in the myriad of projects op there is precisely zero. Why? Because handing me code doesn’t tell me why it’s useful to me. It’s like putting me in a library with no card catalogue.
I’m not saying that you should never release a project as open-source, but that if you’re going to do so, it’s your job to make it worth something to other programmers, because the best code in the world isn’t worth anything if no one knows it’s there.
Going Fishing
Consider this gem from Quake:
float InvSqrt (float x){
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df – (i>>1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f – xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}
If you were a smart programmer who got things done, you’d probably instantly recognize this for what it is: Awesomeness wrapped in bacon.
For the rest of us, it’s a clever piece of code that’s discussed in detail here:
The magic of the code, even if you can’t follow it, stands out as the i = 0x5f3759df – (i>>1); line. Simplified, Newton-Raphson is an approximation that starts off with a guess and refines it with iteration. Taking advantage of the nature of 32-bit x86 processors, i, an integer, is initially set to the value of the floating point number you want to take the inverse square of, using an integer cast. i is then set to 0x5f3759df, minus itself shifted one bit to the right. The right shift drops the least significant bit of i, essentially halving it.
Using the integer cast of the seeded value, i is reused and the initial guess for Newton is calculated using the magic seed value minus a free divide by 2 courtesy of the CPU.
If you were like most programmers and you scrolled across this function, you’d probably wonder what the heck it did. In fact, unless someone took the time to tell you, you might even skip over it.
But, what if you saw the article on Slashdot? Even if you had no idea about it before hand, seeing more than just the code immediately helps you as a programmer.
The end result?
You are now a better programmer because someone took the time to explain the code, instead of just releasing it into the wild.
Teach Me to Fish
If you’re going to release your site as open-source, then go the extra steps and take the users through the problems you had. Make it into an n-part blog post that details the neat parts. Write a book. Record a Podcast. Do something other than just releasing the code.
There are plenty of lessons we could learn from Stack Overflow and WikipediaMaze, but seeing the end result isn’t as useful to other programmers as taking them through your code, and showing them why you made the decisions you did. You get recognition and Google traffic, and the programming community learns how to fish.