+1

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 4:36 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 1/25/2012 1:13 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
>
>> itself. For example, there's a system used for many digital archives that
>> splits a field in two anytime a field that needs to be represented by an
>> XML entity is encountered. Name withheld to protect the guilty.
>>
>
> Why are we so eager to 'protect the guilty' in discussions like this?
>
> Our reluctance to share info on problems with software we use (because of
> fear of offending the vendor?) means that it's very difficult for a library
> to find out about the plusses and minuses of any given product when
> evaluating solutions.
>
> Don't even bother googling -- nobody will publically call this stuff out
> on a blog, or even in a public listserv! It's on private customer-only
> listservs and bug trackers, or even more likely nowhere at all. When you
> want to find out the real deal, you have to start from scratch, contact
> personal contacts at other institutions that have experience with each
> software you are curious about, and ask them one-on-one in private.
> Wasting time, cause everybody has to do that each time they want to find
> out the current issues, so many offline one and one conversations (or so
> many people that just give up and don't even do the 'due dilligence'), only
> finding out about things your personal contact happened to have encountered.
>
> Why can't we just share this stuff in public and tell it like it is, so
> the information is available for people who need it?
>
> If you want to find out about problems and issues with _succesful_
> software that isn't library-specific, it's not hard to. You can often find
> public issue trackers from the developers, but if not you can find public
> listservs and many blog posts where people aren't afraid to describe the
> problem(s) they encountered, there's no 'protecting of the guilty.' Hint,
> this is part of what _makes_ such software succesful.
>
> Jonathan
>