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No More Coding From Scratch?
Susan Elliott Sim asks: "In the science fiction novel, 'A Deepness in the Sky,' Vernor Vinge described a future where software is created by 'programmer archaeologists' who search archives for existing pieces of code, contextualize them, and combine them into new applications. So much complexity and automation has been built into code that it is simply infeasible to build from scratch. While this seems like the ultimate code reuse fantasy (or nightmare), we think it's starting to happen with the availability of Open Source software. We have observed a number of projects where software development is driven by the identification, selection, and combination of working software systems. More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components. These parts are then made to interoperate through wrappers and glue code. We think this trend is a harbinger of things to come. What do you think? How prevalent is this approach to new software development? What do software developers think about their projects being used in such a way?"
This idea is being pushed by suits who think it will cut costs and increase profits. And it probably will, in the short term... as long as your customers lower their expectations instead of jumping ship. Welcome to the future of unmaintainable garbage software. (Then again, if you've been running Windows you probably won't notice the difference.)
Yeah Windows XP bugs makes up 90% of the source code. The other 10% was stolen^H^H^H^H^H^H borrowed from DEC VMS and *BSD Unix source code.
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