Because it's fun

Recently I read an Paper written by Michael Tiemann, it quoted a survey result for the over 490,000 open source developers on sourceforge.com about the reason of involving in open source software:

The three top reasons they list for their involvement is:
1. Because it's fun
2. Because it improves their skills
3. Because it is good for society

It is interesting. Usually we mention that the contribution of open source software to the world and how meaningful it is. But people usually won't do something just because it is meaningful (i.e. only few people work for charity), people usually do something because it is fun. People even willing to pay for fun!

When someone talk about Software Engineering, with troublesome documentation, processes and procedures... one will reply "well, I will do it because I know it is useful, I know I know..." but it is not fun at all. So people would do that as a job, as a part of their earn for living, without passion and motivation to improve it.

That's why open source is different. That's why people would like to spend their spare time to development software for free (Remember, people even willing to pay for fun!). That's why people in open source are full of passion and motivated. Because it's fun!

Stacked memused on kSar

PS. My patch for memused (buffer adjusted) is accepted by kSar and released in kSar-4.0.14. Thank you for the developer Alexandre Cherif and all others support!

Here is my second patch for kSar: Stacked memory graph.



It added a new option to stack the following together into one graph:

• memused (buffer adjusted)
  
• buffers
  
• cached
  
• free
  
• swap used
  

When all these information are plotted in different graphs, they all have different scale. It is good if you just want to view particular piece of information, but it is difficult for comparison. Sometimes it would be misleading that a large fluctuation on one graph actually mean a change in range of a few kbytes, which is just a small ripple on another graph.

Currently I just implemented this feature on Linux part of kSar. I am not sure if it is useful for other OS such as AIX, HPUX or Solaris. If someone think it is good to have this feature on other OS, please contact me and tell me how to "stack" the memory info of those OS. :-)

Here is the patch for kSar-4.0.14.
Here is the compiled jar with this feature as an option.