Bug hunters, software firms in uneasy alliance

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Sounds like wishful thinking to me

"If businesses ever manage to get their heads out of their butts and develop TRUE proprietary models with rational and moral compensation structures that reward those who create valuable, high-quality products, open source will wither into obsolescence"

Paying cash-for-quality code has never worked. Certainly it will never cause Open Source to "wither and die". Once a company grows above a certain size the coders' - no matter how competent - are relegated down the hierarchy along with product quality. The new big earners will be the incoming managers who can hit production targets while cutting as many corners as possible and still producing a saleable product. Open Source does not have this problem. As long as the acceptance criteria for Open Source code code is high, Open Source applications will evolve faster and better with consistently higher quality than their proprietary cousins. Where is Open Source inferior, and why? Answer - where commercial or vested interests have deliberately kept it down, bu secret APIs, unreleased hardware or other driver details. The collaborative Open Source process is inherently better suited to producing quality code than proprietary. Imagine a widget project. The proprietary company advertises and interviews, hires people who can getinto the office 9 - 5. The Open Source community has widget experts living in Hong Kong, Australia, Britain, the US and France. They all work on the Widget code, in their own time, at their leisure. They care about what they're doing. No manager is going to turn up to tell them that while 2 full days unit testing is very good for quality it is costing "the company" too much and must now be kept to half a day oh and by the way the Widget interface has been promised to the customer by the 20th so I expect you to be putting in some overtime this week.

The only exceptions to the corner-cutting-for-profit I've seen in the software industry have been in the areas of safety critical and in-house business critical. There are no 'new' applications left to be coded, pretty much, only 'new' ways of packaging existing functional modules up into 'new' products. Which might explain why some monopolies are going all out to "own" methods via patterns ... the dinosaurs will fight to the end for the right to take money off the consumer for a commodity that can be produced, at equal quality, by a community. They will fail.

Posted by: whisperycat   Posted on: 09/06/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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