I must say that I have never felt ripped off with an open source project. I don't even have to find myself amongst the dregs of the internet searching for a cracked version of whatever software. For the most part, when I try something new out, it's as easy as `apt-get install somethingnew` and I have it installed and everything (ah, the beauty of Debian). Free software is just that: Free!

This makes me then wonder why in the world others in the Linux/BSD community whine about X open source software or Y free software project. If GNU was powered by the principle of "You get what you pay for," we'd all be sitting in front of shiny new boxes, with the latest 3,598,271,345,687 core processor in it, and just staring. There'd be nothing there, because no one paid for it. Granted, sometimes you must have that eye rolling experience with some software, but I've learned as a developer you can either laugh or cry at those moments, and I much prefer laughing. So if you want a good project, pay for it. Just not with money.

Case in point: I've been trying to do a weekly release of new features for the site (which I have already deviated from on the first week I need to do something). Since this software is built on Django, the feature implementation has just been splendidly fun. But I've found one drawback: updates to models. If you want to change models around, add fields, remove fields, and the like, it's back to SQL for you. I'm comfortable with SQL, so that's not a problem. However, I like Django, and I like python. I want to stay where Django and python live, and play with them forever. Now, understanding that the fine details are NOT trivial, I've decided that I am going to fix the problem by creating a some sort of toolkit for resolving the dependencies, and generating a sql update script. This will make my life easier, and maybe, just maybe, someone else will benefit from it as well. I've been doing some proofing with hopes to have something out by the end of next week (to help with next weeks update).