What's So Precious About Bad Software?

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."

Comments

It goes back too...

[iknownuttin]

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.

Re:It goes back too...

[darkmeridian]

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.

Often companies can't release it for legal reasons

[AaronW]

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.

Look at the losers and you'll see ... losers

[kscguru]

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?