I just listened to the Open Source Panel episode of .NET Rocks! and was interested in one of Richard's comments: That one of the major pain points of open source is that when you have an idea for a feature or fix, the response is often, "if you want it, write it yourself!"

This reminded me of an experience I had back a few years ago when Mad Props ran on an open-source content-management system called PHPNuke.

Rather than using proper HTML lists (eg. the <ul> and <ol> tags), PHPNuke actually wrote its list items out as lines separated by <br> tags (line breaks) and preceded by a special character called "middot", which looks like the dot that list items start with.

I rewrote the code for our site so that it wrote proper HTML list tags. It means that it was much easier to style (using CSS) and had a much cleaner look.

Have a look at the response I got (from the user called "chris-au") in this forum thread when I proposed rolling these changes back into the core.

It wasn't so much, "write it yourself" (since I had). It was more like, "Why should we take any changes? That'll just mean more work for users who are creating themes."

I was dumbfounded to say the least.

Shortly thereafter we started looking at other CMSes. We briefly toyed with Drupal (for which I wrote a module that I'm sure is in use out there somewhere) and then eventually settled on Community Server. Glad we did!

(Of course it's just "I" now rather than "we", but there were a few of us co-running the site back then.)