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

kinda true

[sdedeo]

As a scientist, I write a lot of code to do things that other people have already done. I sometimes think about "releasing" it -- informally, without a license, just on a webpage or something. But it really is embaressment that holds me back -- it's poorly documented, full of hacks, and basically inelegant.

I remember as an undergraduate suggesting to my advisor that I release my (actually rather pretty) code that I wrote to do general relativistic raytracing around neutron stars. His response? "People will not understand your code, they will misuse it, and then they will blame you when it gets them in trouble." You might expect someone who's doing raytracing around compact objects to not be so silly as to do something like that, but I think you'd be mistaken: I know I treat the few publicly available codes in my field (e.g., camb) with great disrespect, bitch all the time, and generally am part of the large community that makes it far more trouble than it's worth for the poor people who worked so hard on it.

Re:kinda true

[letxa2000]

But what's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment."

Oh, please. That's got to be the goofiest premise I've seen in a long time.

Code is kept "secret" because the companies, rightly or wrongly, think it gives them a competitive advantage. Heck, some companies should be embarrassed about the appearance of their product, do you really think some suits care about how it looks on the inside? Does Coke keep its formula secret because it's embarrassed or because it wants to make its product harder to copy? Same goes for software.

Heck, many open source products are no beauty to peer into, either. The code is so nasty that the argument of "If you don't like it, you can fix or modify it yourself" is reduced to a smart-ass comment with no real validity. Modify that code? First you have to be able to understand the mess. Unless you've been responsible for the mess from the beginning, or have a lot of time to invest in figuring out the mess, good luck with that.

Obvious?

[dracocat]

Well, we invested a lot of money and resources to get the product written so that we could make money from it.

If we publish it and another companies takes it and uses it to make a competing product we will make less money.

Do we need another reason?

Different Approaches

[quo_vadis]

Another thing to consider is the fundamentally different mentalities the two camps (open source vs closed source) have. For closed source, all that matters is shipping a working product. So what if it breaks if you have more than 4GB of RAM or your directory naming convention must be exactly so. The open source approach on the other hand tends to be we wont call our product done till the code is perfectly optimized for all systems from a VAX to a Blue Gene. Also, one must consider that individuals and companies are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to reasons why they have not released code. For individuals, there is personal criticism from programmers about their code. But, one has to keep in mind that not all individuals are programmers. If a recent physics PhD chooses to release the code he used to process output of his high energy particle physics simulations for his thesis, he would be heaped with scorn for spaghetti code despite the fact the code accomplished its primary purpose (get enough data to get the guy his degree) and did it in a reasonable time frame. For companies, there is simply a strong sense of possessiveness. They are loath to give away anything; including code for products they dont use or support anymore.