Earlier today, Nick Bradbury asked a good question about the features included in free software…

Yesterday I wrote about killing unused features. But what about killing a feature that people do use?

He’s talking about FeedDemon, and he really wants to kill a feature that I use every day. As a software developer, however, I understand where he is coming from.

The News Item List in FeedDemon is not the most popular of features and apparently not too many people use it. I have used that feature since day one, but it is now “inactive” by default so many people don’t even know about it. As a longtime FeedDemon fan, I use that feature everyday. In fact, removing the news item list would change the way I use FeedDemon, and it would be quite a shock for me to get used to.

As a developer though, I think he should remove it. The feature slows things down and is a pain in the butt for him to maintain. If I was the developer of FeedDemon, I would remove it. If a feature is a drain on the system and would improve overall performance it needs to be pulled for the benefit of the software package.

I recently pulled a few features from Stuffr. It no longer works with Twitter or Pownce, and I pulled the “technorati tagger” because I felt it was no longer adding value to the application. I’ll never make much money by riting and maintaining Stuffr. The donations that have come in thus far won’t pay for a trip to the dollar store, let alone a trip to the Outer Banks, but I do it because I enjoy it. I needed a good blogging application that worked the way I wanted it to, and I wrote Stuffr to fill that need. I certainly hope other people find it useful as well.

There are a lot of people saying they will “never use FeedDemon again” if Nick removes the feature and people are really fired up. It’s going to be a tough decision for him, but whatever he decides, I will still be a FeedDemon fan, and more than likely, I’ll be using the product for a long time to come.

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