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Open-Source Development 'Faster, Better, Cheaper'
David Hart writes "Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering --
Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the 'textbook' software engineering often used in corporate settings."
Textbook soft.eng is about making money and how to prevent from being sued [e.g. you do what you agreed todo].
While OSS development [well freelance stuff anyways] tends to be more about actually getting work out the door. Don't like this particular OSS, fix it or find other stuff. E.g. no pandoring to stupid demands of market droids.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
In the context of development, "faster" and "cheaper" are somewhat well-defined, but "better" is simply too fuzzy. There are many qualities which contribute to "better", and some of them are in conflict (e.g. "more profitable for the marketer" vs. "easier to get bugs fixed"), depending on the value system of the speaker.
We need to be more precise in our terms when defending or advocating open source, else we'll appear as silly as the suits that think that programmers that expend more lines of code to produce a solution are thereby more productive (or geeks-who-should-know-better who think that execution wall clock time is the only measure of "efficiency").
Open source projects attract people who have an interest, and often a talent, for the project. The same can't be said for many corporate projects, where you may be shoveling shit, but you're being paid to shovel shit.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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Not all open-source projects are alike, however. A small number of open-source projects have become well known, but the vast majority never get off the ground, according to Scacchi.
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Open source is obviously faster/better/cheaper when 1000's of people donate their time to a single project. The only open source project I've been involved in was a collaboration among several corporations, all of which wanted to leverage each other's resources, but none of which could really contribute their own.
There's nothing like money to motivate people to work on a project for which people aren't willing to donate their time.
Personally, I'm not convinced speed is related to developer quantity. There's too big a variation in productivity between experienced and amateur developers.
I'm also not convinced open-source is right for all types of software. How many open-source developers you know that conduct large-scale usability tests? How many open-source developers go around interviewing end users? When the developer and product consumer is the same, open-source makes much more sense to me.
This setting wouldn't work most of the time, IMHO.
For open source to work there needs to be a certain public interest in the software, and there need to be developers in the group of interested people. Opening up software that nobody wants to look at or develop further is totally pointless.
A lot of software out there (I dare to argue it's the majority of the software out there.) is simply too boring or to business-specific to benefit at all from open source.
+++ATH0
That's debateable. What you need to debate is what else is doing what they are doing.
Mozilla: It's making a standards-compliant browser. It is clearly done faster, as it's the only one out there. Fairly self-evident.
Wine: It's reimplementing an OS without access to the internals. What are you comparing that to for purposes of determining its speed? I personally think it is occuring extremely fast, all things considered.
Linux: Seems to be developing fairly on-par with other kernels. Yes, it took a while to get to where it is now, and had some comparitive slumps, but where was everything else when Linux started? Unix was ahead. Windows was DOS, right? MacOS was an early classic one? I really don't know, but it seems fairly close.
Consider this: It's ahead of Windows on most high-end stuff, now, and has been on-and-off for a while.
MacOS had a speedy jump in progress with OS-10, but that was also open-source development (BSD base, partially open still) so that's just an agreeing argument.
As for commercial Unixes, I haven't a clue, so I won't talk about them.
gcc: I haven't a clue. I really don't. Just noting it because you did.
For my own example, MPlayer: MPlayer started about the same time that media players got big on other systems. Without having any source information for codecs and so-such, it's stayed just as far along technically. Ever since it's been around, I've been able to watch things about equally well under any OS, except DVDs.
The main area I see OSS lacking is in interfaces, which is why MPlayer is such a good example. Good God, is that a bad interface. Not the worst, no, but it tries. I'd say that is a part of the 'better' thing.
OSS is good at doing most of stuff, just not at getting EVERYTHING together. For a lot of things they do the technical end while the interface lags, or they do the interface and it's got a buggy back-end, or they make something really good but it is so messy inside it needs a total re-write to add anything.
I don't know how that compares with the problems of closed source, as I've never worked on it, but those are just the way I see the issues.
You forgot one reason to do open source.
I'm a good programmer, I can write an OS, windowing system, Word Processer, etc all by my self. Well in theory, doing all that alone to even the quality of Windows 3.0 and WordPerfect for Windows (which sucked in those days) is close to byond the time I will live, and in the meantime I don't have programs to use.
When I work in open source I can take advantage of other's work. So I write [part of] the VM for the kernel, while others write everything else to make the kernel work, more others right the libraries and utilties, and still others write my windowing system and word processer. Put it all togather and I have free programs to use, and the ability to change anything. So last year I re-wrote the VM that everyone is now using, this year I can direct my attention to nethack making it even better.
In other words: don't overlook the value of working with others.
There is a mentality by some, not all, in the OSS world that anything closed source to hit their computers is bad. I was at a convention recently about 3D animation software. One of my big consulting clients is a medium sized arcitecture/graphics firm. They had just abandoned some very cool software designed to run on the DEC Alpha platform for Maya and they chose to run it on Linux. Why? They tested Maya on both Wintel, Linux on x86, and Macintosh. The designers seem to like it on Linux and it was stable. Plus Linux would run on their existing hardware without any problems.
Anyway, at this convention, there was one Linux Zeloat there that couldn't "Believe you would tait the pureness of the OSS Linux with that commercial crap. Haven't you heard of Blender?" At first I thought he was joking.
I had used blender for personal use since 1.8. Yes, Blender is a good program, but even for someone like me the learning curve is steep as hell. Plus you have to export to a 3rd party app for rendering with raytracing. Blender is comming along and has had some nice features added since reaching OSS land.
However, 3 of their Graphic Artist had previous experience with Maya and could help the other two learn the program. The simple fact this company was going to ditch Windows for Linux should be a victory for the OS and OSS land. But the mentaily of "All OSS or non at all" held by some is a mistake.
Look at GIMP. I know 2.0 is scheduled for release soon, but GIMP today compared to that of 1999...it hasn't changed much. Back when I was using Photoshop 4 & the early days of 5, I thought for sure that GIMP would leap frog them or at least improve to the point of being an equal. It almost appears that GIMP developement stood still while Photoshop 6 and then 7 was realeased with many great new features. Maybe 2.0 will see some improvements, but that is one example of where OSS hasn't surpassed its commerical counterparts.
If Linux is going to thrive on the desktop, it will need supported non-OSS software from people like Adobe and Macromedia. I will pay for good software, and so will many others. Free is looked upon with a keen eye, Econ 101: THere is no free lunch.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.