When I was younger I believed in free software, but now I had to think not because at the core of every project is the earning of money and nothing other. It would have been nice to be able to start a project management software which then gave to the world community and was developed by all programmers who want to be part of it. A project such as Linux, where everyone participates in creating free software for the community.
Specifically, let’s talk about my project called MerciGest, an application for warehouse management, born a few years ago and to manage small stocks. I started just for fun MerciGest, about 8 years ago and with the intention of involving more developers as possible, which is why he was born in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), a language and a development environment very simple. As I have written in many of my other articles, however, the effect was not as hoped, in fact, despite having shared the project on sourceforge I never found anyone to grow the application. In the time it has been downloaded tens of thousands of times between the various websites, but I have not found anyone who has written a few lines of code to enrich it with new features and then share it again. In fact I must say that more than once I found myself in front of requests for help to understand the source code, programmers was developing for its customers, rather than sharing, everyone has always taken care of his own business.
I’m still very fond of the project MerciGest, developing this application I have experienced in many things that I did not think you could do in Access and in these summer days I took the opportunity to translate, at least on the side facing of the user, in 4 languages. Now is downloaded hundreds of times a day, not only in Italian but also in English, Spanish and French. Of course I praise, people do not need to start from scratch a design for a warehouse management system! However, the very purpose for which the program was born has failed, who knows, maybe one day someone will develop it for the community.