Comment by berkes
3 years ago
I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine. Because a lot of software really is crap. Open Source is not a trait that suddenly makes software better.
My point was this: calibre does a lot. Many things only tangentially related to "managing ebooks". Yet it doesn't do some obvious things that are clearly part of managing ebooks. Like, managing ebooks.
That is criticism towards the model, not the software. It criticizes the lack of polish and lack of focus that many FLOSS suffers from. "Do one thing and do that well" is what I prefer. As opposed to a kitchen sink of plugins, an ever wider spread of use-case half-covered With, again, emphasis on the I.
I actually think Calibre's kitchen-sink approach is great. By-and-large I don't really need the fifty things it does to be best-in-class. If it's good enough, then it's fewer UNIX-style utilities I need to download on top of my existing installation.
For example, for end-to-end ebook creation or editing, I would probably download Sigil. But for the majority of e-book edits that I do (generating or fixing a broken Table of Contents, correcting the odd typo here and there, looking at the CSS rules that are causing the book to display weirdly on my Kobo, etc), Calibre's e-book editor is fine.
> I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine.
Dude. If you're a woman and you make jokes about how women should be at home cleaning not being engineers, it's not "fine", it just makes you a dickhead. Even if you're a woman. The same goes here.
If you work an open source, that doesn't give you a free moral entitlement to tell other people their work is crap, should have more features, should have the one feature you personally want for whatever reason.
You don't like it?
Too bad. It's not for you then. Don't use it.
Be respectful of others; the contribution they make, the effort they go to.
It costs you literally nothing.
I think the issue here is that your critique is way out of proportion to reality; Calibre is... fine. It's not great; but it does the job perfectly well for lots of people. It does lots of things. It does most of them fine. It does some well, some badly. I could say the same thing about the gimp. You come off as just having an axe to grind here for no good reason; and negative comments like this do cause people to stop contributing.
If you don't like it, just.. don't. use it.
Or fork it and implement your feature. Even make a PR if you really think that something the main product should have.