These essays are no more than opinion pieces and should not be taken for official statements
In the world of software development there can be a lot of duplication of effort – in creating tools, in dealing with code, even communication. There can also be a lot of wasted time, wasted money.
Various community projects are actively supported by Wilcox Development Solutions for just this reason. The advantage to these community projects is that the work of one developer is made available to the entire community – possibly saving thousands of man hours of work. New features, fixing bugs, soliciting and giving feedback, these are all important tasks to make publicly used tools better.
Wilcox Development Solutions has published several developer tools in an effort to provide timesaving methods to these same developers. Tools will continue to be published as internal demand and use of our tools grows. We want to publish a well rounded, time tested, tool to the community – something that will truly be helpful.
At the programming level, there is a different form of competition than at the market level. At the programming level the competition is who can ship faster, find ways to find and fix (or work around) bugs faster, what value you can give to your project. At the market level the competition is about what app has the best features, is the most reliable, and is the most usable. This disparity allows a great deal of interaction between developers – the end user doesn't care if some of the window drawing code in A-Edit was based off sample code from one of the engineers creating B-Edit. The customers only want it to work reliably.
This ability to interact, this fellowship of developers dealing with the same tools, sometimes running across the same issues, sharing the same grief (or stress) about shipping – this bonds us together. Often community projects exist because a bunch of developers had the same problem, and are working together to solve it.
Of course, as a developer one does not sharing industrial (or product) secrets. Often one shares or improves tools just to be helpful. "Here, I wanted XYZ feature in Community-Edit, and here it is. Its made my life so much easier.". That, in itself, is the key to the Spirit Of Developer Community.
