Open Source Code Maintainability Analyzed

gManZboy writes "Four computer scientists have done a formal analysis of five Open Source software projects to determine how being "Open Source" contributes to or inhibits source code maintainability. While they admit further research is needed, they conclude that open source is no magic bullet on this particular issue, and argue that Open Source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability." From the article: "The disadvantages of OSS development include absence of complete documentation or technical support. Moreover, there is strong evidence that projects with clear and widely accepted specifications, such as operating systems and system applications, are well suited for the OSS development model. However, it is still questionable whether systems like ERP could be developed successfully as OSS projects. "

Comments

Was this really a surprise?

[StateOfTheUnion]

Was this really a surprise? Did anyone think that open osurce software is as a general rule well documented or documented as well as many commercial projects that have project management (for better or worse) and technical writers on staff to do internal as well as external documentation?

Re:Was this really a surprise?

[Peeteriz]

In the enterprise, for example, financial companies, is quite common to be writing and maintaining additions/modifications to some huge software package that your company has bought - you write routines that run together with their code, there are facilities for such modifications/additions.

However, you can't *really* know how *their* code works - you must interoperate with this code, but their code has (a lot of) bugs and is poorly documented - there is a lot of documentation, but it mostly covers the trivial parts, and if you *need* to know the exact behaviour in some tricky situation, then trial-and-error is the only way.
And of course, you have no access to their source code.
You may pay a huge sum of money and get that access, but the amounts involved are ridiculously huge.
You may request a change from them - but again, the costs are huge - for a trivial change they charge so much that you can fund a programmer man-year in-house - so in-house workarounds are the way to go.

Extremely Ridiculous Publishing

[bperkins]

GNU General Public License (GPL)
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)

are all defined in the article.

But not ERP.

Go figure.

Bleh

[Neil Blender]

One need only peruse the source code of 5 randomly picked source forge projects to figure this one out.

Re:Bleh

[pclminion]

One need only peruse the source code of 5 randomly picked source forge projects to figure this one out.

Yeah, but don't blame it on OSS. This is simply another embodiment of the long-tailed distribution of human stupidity. In any human endeavor there are a large number of people who are Unskilled and Unaware of it. These people will try their hand at whatever catches their attention, and the results usually range from mediocre to terrible.

There's a lot of really bad fan fiction out there, too. And terrible amateur cartoons. And naive, uninformed political opinions.

What we witness on SourceForge is merely a demonstration of the inability of most people to accomplish anything of any importance. Nothing specific to OSS.

This assumes commercial software is any better

[Augusto]

And it's often not.

Many of us have and are working in the "real world" out there, and I've been less than impressed with most documentation on large products.

Not to mention design documents, which end up being dead documents that are outdated as soon as the first line of code is written. To many corporations, there's no big incentive to spend so much money on these types of activities when you can have people just churning out code and finishing the darned product in the end.

I'm not saying commericial development is any worse, but I can't say it's any better for sure either.

Mirror this article for closed source development.

[dilvie]

I'd like to see the same story aproach done for closed source projects. Since the focus here was on open source, specifically, it wasn't really well balanced, and it didn't tell us anything new. Anybody who's browsed sourceforge could have told you that open source development has its share of problems.

The real question is whether or not closed source projects are all that better off.

In theory...

[the_skywise]

I always thought that if you have enough people "chewing" (working) on the same module that it should eventually self-standardize into a least common denominator of maintainability. Which, if not the most maintainable code, should be as maintainable as possible given the design and interoperability constraints (with other modules). Evolutionarily speaking... it HAS to be maintainable or it "dies" (becomes unmaintained and then unused or superceded by another implementation).

On the flip side, a closed source module could be built "top down" to a unified set of coding standards that would help maintainability. But it's not a requirement. I've seen plenty of code bases built just this way that were horrific... But still maintained and not changed because management was willing to throw enough money to keep things going (but not enough money to make it more interoperable).

YMMV.

Open Source ERP

[stiller]

However, it is still questionable whether systems like ERP could be developed successfully as OSS projects.

I could be mistaken, but isn't Compiere an established OSS ERP implementation?

I think the questin shouldn't be: 'Can software like ERP be developed as OSS?' But rather: 'Are there enough people in the OSS community interested enough to develop this kind of software without any form of financial support?' I think the answer has turned out to be 'no'. The same goes for things like (good) financial software, and anything that would require heaps of work, high precision and coordination, but no spectaculair result for the common man to brag about.

The language is very important

[doc modulo]

- C++ is more readable than assembler
- C# and Java are more readable than C++ ...
- At the end of this list are functional programming languages.

If you can read source more easily, then maintainability will be better.

This article will tell you why you should be interested in functional programming languages. If you're smart and open minded, you will be convinced.

The best functional languages are Haskell and Erlang (click "next" at the bottom of the page).

For example, with Java you prevent bugs by static typing variables, example:

int numberOfTries = 3;

If you later try to fill "numberOfTries" with a string, the compiler will warn you of a bug and you'll have prevented it.

With Haskell, you don't have to type int. Haskell will figure out the type for you, you get the benefit of preventing bugs with the convenience of not having to type variables.

The reason I chose Erlang is because with functional purely functional programming languages like Erlang, you can automatically multitask your program over several CPU's (or this will take minimal effort). Nice feature to have in the future because every CPU manufacturere is going multi-core chip now. Also, you can easily make a server that never goes down with Erlang because your server is automatically clustered. Just plonk down a couple networked PC's and if one dies, the server cluster will just keep on going (a bit slower) until you replaced the power supply of the broken PC.

There are tons of other advantages but, as I said, the above links will convince you if you're smart. Haskell is a bit more academic in nature, they're figuring out the best possible language and Erlang is more polished and ready to go. It was invented by Ericsson to create ultra reliable realtime servers.

Can I ask a stupid question?

[rastin]

Are there standard methodologies for making non-oss code maintainable? If there are its news to me, every place I've worked has been uterly bass ackwards with their source code. Redundant libraries that do the same functions (one writen by Bob the other by Fred). Documentation that is years out of date with reality. And all the dead objects floating around, (its safer to leave them in that pull them out). With non-oss you get a pretty users manual, maybe that is what people call maintainable. Not to say there can't be sloppy OSS code. I think a great topic for discussion would be just plain maintainablity, whether its OSS or not.

The article mentions doubt on whether an ERP system can be build OSS, why not? Are they planning on giving every end user the source code and ability to recompile the company's ERP? When I install Linux and friends on my mother-in-law's computer I don't plan on giving her the source code, is it implied that OSS is less maintainable because you cannot tell if someone has an altered version? It just freaking code!