Hello All,

The reason I reply to the poll "have you ever modified the source code of an open source application" is that I would like to stress the importance of open source.
And get that out to the consumerist software world.

Still find it strange that software started as a means to change the functioning of hardware and later became a "product". Esp you cannot buy/own it, just a license dictated by a vendor. Usually with all bells and whistles. Involving time consuming legalese. ( by the lawyers for the lawyers ? )
(Still highly appreciate the Borland no-nonsense license statement though)

I can say yes to the poll although in my case the change was very minor, but solved a very annoying "bug".
There was a "hard" keybinding mix up between backspace / delete function.
I guess remnant from the old days terminals.
Could not fix it by mapping keys outside of the program, so had to change the source code and recompile.

regards to All

For a moment I thought I wrote the above. After a decade of no computer access (sicknesses), I am getting back in a bit. I find old friends still buzzing around. The same needs are here, the bureaucrats again are winning the day.
Complexity and trickery are increasing, reliability is as low as ever.
I found some new developments encouraging, some depressing and others alarming.
The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.

Plans are the basis for changes. Source code is the same.

Simon

Yes.

The first time was few years ago, when the module usb_modeswitch had started and was not yet included in the kernel upstream.
In an abroad stay, I had purchased a 3G GSM USB modem (Huawei E220) and it did not work with my RHEL 5 at that time.
With my programming knowledge that excludes Python, I was glad the author (it was a gentleman from Germany, sorry I cannot remember his name) assisted me, and I had been able to somehow modify the module and get the work being recognized and working.

The second is more recent. It was easier, as it is Bash. I submitted a PR that stalls in github since.

Regards,

libxml2 and libcsoap (not widely used anymore). On libxml2 I made changes they brought back to the source code. I also made changes just for me but as a previous person said, not so much anymore. libcsoap -- I may have the only working copy. I modified it for later standard and protocols and to work properly on AIX.

Back in the 90s, when trying to get things like gopher to compile on SVR4.2, I would need to mess with make files, and sometimes the code itself.

I have, and still do, heavily contribute to open source projects.

Among the most notable are Nagios, Connection Kit, Odoo and Several Scripts of Bash.

... in my early Linux days when compiling one's kernel was more common, I tweaked the SCSI driver so that my Adaptec controller would be recognized first and the disks assigned to it would be "sda", "sdb", etc. It's been ages since I cared about that---especially since mount-by-label (or UUID) is available.

I dove into the Drupal's source code back when PostgreSQL support was hit or miss and fixed some quirky things that didn't work right when the lion's share of its user base was using MySQL (and, probably, still is). Drupal's developers employed some MySQL-only SQL extensions -- specifically, it was the "REPLACE" statements that PostgreSQL balked at -- but I'm no longer sure if that's still the case and, frankly, no longer care as I walked away from Drupal years ago.

Yes indeed, when you have no other options

Originally I worked with Unix machines and as part of it with OSS. Between 2002 and 2010 I coded software for Solaris, including Unix printer driver on my own but my code frequently was based on coding of similar drivers and programs created by other programmers including OSS programmers.

About 12 years ago, I submitted changes to the legacy branch of JES - Java Email Server (http://javaemailserver.sourceforge.net/). Alas, I don't think my changes were ever incorporated.

No, but I actually had a company ask me back in 1993 to modify the kernel of Solaris 2 because they could not figure out how to write a driver for a National Instruments card they had purchased. They wanted me to make the kernel real-time. I told them Solaris kernel is real-time. The driver they received with the NI card was just a demo and worked in the user space. They needed to write a driver that worked in the kernel space. I told them to send someone to Sun's driver school. Instead they threw out their Solaris computers on a card and bought Windows computers on a card. Such a waste!

No, I am newish to Linux & have a lot to learn. 😁

Now and then. And I usually push them upstream successfully. Perhaps that’s because they’re generally small tweaks.
Never think your contribution is too small to bother making, I say! Often the smaller the better?

No.

It happened 2 or 3 times because the sources were well documented and I was able to understand where the problem was.
There was a display problem in a backup program written in C