I love Free Software

Ross asks Do you love Open Source?

I totally have to say that I don't love Free Software only. Especially I love working in a Free Software environment. To explain my point of view I'm going to tell some stories I got involved to at work:

Bug Tracking

IMHO we should require all companies to provide public bug trackers so clients can more easily request changes/fixes/improvements than they would by contacting support teams, getting forwarded to developers and finally ending up in a contract that's made based upon a specification (which often lacks information) to get things implemented.

Using a public working bug tracking system (which includes bugzilla - for me, I know not everyone agrees here) can reduce these things to "we pay much money if you fix bug ####" the bug would contain all the information necessary to contact people to discuss missing spec aspects

Did you ever use the Team Coherence Bug Tracker?

Fixing/Improving third party tools

So what if your proprietary bug tracker is delivered as a dll to be embedded into your web server and the bug tracker web frontend doesn't answer? You restart the web server and hope everything is fine, you cannot dig into it to find the reason, submit a well founded bug report and wait for a fix, all you can do is "pray this doesn't happen again".

So what if your network communication library produces "funny results" on certain machines? "Funny results" means: if you try to open a connection with that library on a certain setup in a certain subnet, "something weird happens" (read: you can't ping anything except localhost and the ip of your ethernet device). You need to suggest "try to use a newer Broadcom driver". Three weeks later you get told: "Hey we fixed it, we tried a new driver." No comments.

Version Management

Did you ever try to use software such as Team Coherence to manage your sources? The climax of my tc experience was today: "As a result of changes daylight savings time, tc needs to adjust the timestamps of all the local files."
Sorry, what? It needs to adjust CEST timestamps because it cannot work with them in a CET environment? Also no comments on this one.

I really love the moments when I do some modifications to our local MediaWiki and TestLink installations. It's really refreshing to have all the sources and to be able dig into them as deeply as I want (and as I think it's necessary).