Shareaza is a rather clever piece of software - it allows you to connect to and download from Gnutella, Gnutella2, Bittorrent, and the eDonkey network. With those networks you can probably get anything you want.

I like Shareaza; that was my first client after Kazaa became really crappy, but I have some real problems with it.

The people who program it seem to LOVE writing features - but they almost NEVER seem to go about running down bugs and actually releasing code.

A telling example - some time ago they were banned from a large segment of the eDonkey network because the client wasn’t playing nicely. Though the problem was fixed in the nightly alphas almost immediately, they didn’t put forward a new stable release integrating the changes for nearly a YEAR!

Most recently, if you’ll look at their homepage, you’ll see that they’ve short-circuited the “alpha, beta, release candidate, release” cycle and just stuck up the latest beta for everyone to download. Betas, by definition, are pieces of software not yet appropriate for general usage. At least in the past they made sure that only stable code was on the main page…

I mean, just look at that changelog. More than 200 updates and additions.

Their core group of developers do incredible work; they created a client that I really liked, but they need to run down their bugs more often, so they end up with a final piece of software anyone can safely use on their primary computer.

More after the jump.

This raises some interesting questions about open source software in general. I mean, there are a lot of people that say that open source is the way of the future and that all good projects should be run that way.  While we know that these projects CAN produce strong, stable code (a la Firefox), there doesn’t seem to be enough focus on the amount of work and leadership required to have a stable project.  From what I’ve seen, there appears to be an assumption that, if you have a cool idea, developers willl flock to your project and, at the end of the day, wonderful and stable code will appear.

This seems to be akin to the theory that, if you have a cool enough project in school, all the groupmemebers will magically (with almost no direction) come together and fluidly produce a masterpiece.  We all know that that’s bunk; it doesn’t work like that - you need either a strong leader or a group leadership that assigns tasks, and monitors their rate of completion and quality.

It will be interesting to see what happens to open source in the next few years… will it maintain the “community barn raising” approach, or will it essentially become a buzzword used by companies to attach to their products (“Wheaties!  Now with more Open Source!”).