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What's So Precious About Bad Software?

Posted by kdawson on from the ugly-to-boot dept.

David Gerard invites to read Carla Schroeder from Enterprise Networking Planet, who gets down to the real reason why companies want to keep their code proprietary, with examples. Quoting: "We are drowned in tides of twaddle about precious IP, Trade Sekkrits, Sooper Original Algorithms that must not be exposed to eyes of mere mortals, and all manner of silly excuses. But what's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment."

8 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Prist frost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    As a former programmer working as a network administrator now for a medium size financial company, I can confirm that embarrassment is one of the major reasons why programmers do not let me see their code when it works badly on the network. It is a lot easier to say that the network is bad. Thank god we have ethereal/wireshark.

  2. It goes back too... by iknownuttin · · Score: 5, Informative
    American Airlines and their Sabre booking software. AA had a tech edge back in the 70's with their software. Other airlines actually rented, not licensed, AA's software.

    In a nutshell, I think corps think that their software is soooo competitively important, that they don't want to release it - regardless of how bad it is.

    --
    I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
    1. Re:It goes back too... by darkmeridian · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sabre was crucial technology that kept AA at the head of the pack. The system was quick and assigned the quickest available flight to each passnger. Sabre began as a military system for assigning interceptors to incoming targets, but there was clearly an application to assigning passengers to planes. Sabre eventually got spun off into its own company. Travelocity is based on SABRE technology.

      Another reason for secrecy is that SABRE was used to manipulate rankings to favor American Airlines flights over others. This eventually got outlawed by the federal government as unfair competition.

      --
      A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
  3. Often companies can't release it for legal reasons by AaronW · · Score: 5, Informative

    A lot of software contains proprietary libraries or other pieces of software provided by 3rd parties, which they are not allowed to distribute. It can be a huge job to strip or re-write those libraries, like what Sun had to do with Solaris, and if it's old software, it just isn't worth their time.

    --
    This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
  4. Look at the losers and you'll see ... losers by kscguru · · Score: 4, Informative
    This blogger did something quite insidious and quite stupid: she chose only examples that support her claim. Let's look at all her ugly/evil/l3me closed-source whipping boys: Diebold The poster child for make-a-buck quick. Diebold saw a "need" for electronic voting software, lobbied a few politicians to get sweetheart deals, and came up with substandard, shoddy software. Same moral as always: you get what you pay for, and the gov't paid for the lowest bidder. Samsung's Linux rootkit So Samsung wrote some truly crappy Linux drivers? Well, Samsung's printer driver looks like it was written by a college intern on his first assignment - which probably means it was written by a college intern on his first assignment. Do you really thing Samsung is going to assign their best developers to writing a Linux driver, especially when Linux folks will just reverse-engineer it anyway because they don't like something about it? No, Samsung is going to give the project to the lowest-level code monkey they can find. OF COURSE the code looks crappy. BIOSes Did you know there are exactly two major BIOS vendors out there? That there are no more than a hundred or so professional BIOS developers in the world? Yet there are more copies of BIOS software out there than Windows; everybody expects BIOS to support new whiz-bang features (boot from USB, PXE boot, boot device ordering, processor errata, microcode updates). There simply aren't enough people to make BIOS code look good. BIOS programming is hard - harder than writing a kernel. It's understaffed, and the code quality shows. You think BIOS vendors stick with BIOS because they want lock-in? Ha. How about they don't have enough people to create a replacement, they are too busy patching up last year's code with this year's features. Netscape Yup, the Netscape codebase is an ugly mess. You'd think they implemented features without planning months ahead, almost like they were competing with some other major web browser ... the Netscape mess is a result of competition. I know enough former Netscape engineers to know they don't write crappy code. But when your schedule gets cut from 1 year to 3 months to compete with Redmond, crap will result. Remember, Open Source has the luxury of not having schedule competition - if a company delivers a feature late, developers will find themselves out of a job. StarOffice/OpenOffice Isn't the revisionist history here fun? Do you really think Sun was proud of the StarOffice codebase? No, Sun released it because the Open Source community begged for it (and Sun was the most likely to give in), and Sun wanted an office suite competitor to have SOMETHING to start from. No one ever claimed StarOffice code was any good; the only claim here is that StarOffice was better than nothing. You think Sun's best engineers worked on StarOffice? No, they worked on Solaris and Java. (With apologies to anyone who did work on StarOffice.)

    So... we look at five projects that have every right to contain crappy code, and therefore conclude that companies keep code closed to hide crappy code? Pick crap and you will see crap. How about some successful projects: Microsoft Windows (kernel), Adobe Photoshop, VMware?

    --

    A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

  5. Coca-Cola's secret recipie by Jeremy_Bee · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why doesn't Coca-Cola release their secret recipe? Is it because it's bad? Coca-Cola's "secret recipe" is basically just to add massive amounts of sugar.
    McDonalds "secret sauce" amount to mixing ketchup with mayonaise.

    So, Yes. Part of the reason for these kinds of secrets is that they are "bad" in a sense.
    At the very least, it would be embarrassing to the companies in question to have stuff like this spelled out. :-)
  6. Re:Two reasons... by fyngyrz · · Score: 2, Informative

    code is protected by copyright law

    So are music recordings. And we all know how well that's worked out, right?

    As an earlier poster said, with precise insight: "The honor system is short on honor." We know this. There is no possible doubt about it. And with open source, it only takes one person to steal something in literally seconds that took many years to develop and hone. This is the reality that commercial developers have to live with.

    Speaking as a closed-source, commercial software vendor, I can say with absolute authority that the cleanliness of our code, the presence or quality of comments in it, unethical use of other people's code - these issues have absolutely no bearing on why we're closed source. We're closed source because we do have algorithms that others do not have, particularly in image morphing and geometrics areas; we do gain a competitive advantage from these.

    There is no open-source project that offers capabilities even remotely comparable to those we offer. The gimp takes a vague stab at it, but the present release version offers a fraction of the features while weighing in with a considerably larger executable. That double disparity - larger executable and significantly lower feature count - is one way you can get an immediate feel for the quality of algorithms.

    That smaller executable and some of the techniques we use with plug-ins, etc., also helps us load and get initialized faster and that in turn means our customers can get to work faster. This advantage could easily lost if other people gain access to our algorithms. In the case of features no one else even has, letting that source code out would be outright poison to our competitive advantage.

    Personally, I think the thesis of the FA is largely bankrupt. And copyright is a joke. As soon as you have to go to court, you've pretty much lost. The only winners there are lawyers and companies so large that legal expenses are lost in their revenue stream, and nothing any court does can stem the tide of underground software (and music) distribution anyway, short of shutting down the entire Internet. I consider the act of giving a lawyer money to be an ethical failure. As the owner of five businesses, I do it more often than I'd like to admit, but I dig my heels in all the way when I can. When it comes to protecting 22 years of carefully tweaked original source code, I'm certainly not going to hand the responsibility over to the copyright and patent clown brigades. Trade secret may have its warts, but Johnny Scriptkiddie running off with your work isn't one of them.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  7. Re:kinda true by udippel · · Score: 2, Informative

    I had an employer many moons ago who manufactures PC-add-on boards such as RAID controllers
    [...]
    because a bigger competitors could take that knowledge and turn it into a less expensive product
    [...]
    there were features designed into the hardware ASIC's that should have worked, but didn't.
    [...]
    the company was unwilling to disclose that there were embarrassing design flaws in their hardware, a perception that could have ruined them

    Sounds like your bigger competitor could have been Adaptec. I guess they used the same ASICs. Was the 'race' about circumventing non-functional parts of RAID-controllers ?

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/20/1944233
    http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=111118558813932
    http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archives/html/openbsd-misc/2005-03/msg01362.html