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What Happens To Code From Failed Projects?

Posted by Soulskill on from the great-compiler-in-the-sky dept.

Idzuna writes "With the somewhat recent announcement of Tabula Rasa shutting down, I have been thinking about what will happen to the Server/Client code. Does it get used as a guide for other projects? Does it get destroyed? Or does it just sit there on a hard drive somewhere in storage? The same question applies to many other failed creations. I know the likelihood of the code being distributed freely is next to nil, as most companies probably recycle code. If a vulnerability was found in old code, it could be applied to other products that the company has released. But wouldn't it help development of different projects if such a resource was available?"

7 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's recycled by Lorens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know at least one other company that GPL'd a product that was nice but didn't excite enough monied clients : Solsoft GPL'd Net Security Master, an application-level proxy.

    http://www.hsc.fr/societe/produits/index.html.en

    I worked for Solsoft at the time :-)

  2. It Gathers Cobwebs Till Nobody Left Remembers It by malloc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In my observation at a commercial software firm:

    1. Product is canceled / killed
    2. Developers that know anything about the project are axed or leave
    3. The source control repository sits untouched for year(s).
    4. SCM admins decide the project really is dead, and it can stop wasting prime reliable/backed-up-/offsite storage. Project is archived to offline media.
    5. Now the project is not online, people that worked on it are gone, and managers that worked with it don't want to remember. After another few years people barely even remember it existed.
    6. What's happened to the code? It literally is sitting on physical media gathering cobwebs.

    -Malloc

    --
    ___________________ I want to be free()!
  3. Who cares? by Stinking+Pig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Code is easier and more fun to write than it is to read. The first hurdle in front of this magical "re-usable resource" is that no one even wants to take the time to read it and decide if it's any good; the natural inclination is to write your own.

    Secondly, programmers are just as crowd-driven as anyone else; re-using code from a failed project is swimming upstream, just like writing code in an unpopular language.

    Third strike -- potential legal encumbrance. On the off chance that your project is successful, who know who might come out of the woodwork with a potential claim against it? Look at the SCO Linux lawsuit; even if the claims against your project are totally bogus, they'll still suck years out of your life.

    --
    "Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
  4. Freespace 2 by Xelios · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I always thought it was really cool of Volition to release the source code to Freespace 2 after Interplay's demise. It's allowed a whole ton of custom mods and campaigns that I'm still playing today, 12 years after the game's release. Textures and effects were updated by the mod community and a lot of the new campaigns include new ships or weapons. Some of the best include:

    Beyond The Red Line (BSG conversion with Newtonian physics)
    Blue Planet
    The Procyon Insurgency
    The Babylon Project (Babylon 5 conversion)

    --
    Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
  5. Re:Depends by lowy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

  6. Re: by Gorobei · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I took the opposite approach at my current job. After computing the cost to maintain a line of code (around $10/year,) the logical solution was to delete all unused code. The payoff was great: no more worrying about breaking compatibility, smaller, cleaner codebase, etc.

    Another plus was that shelved code tends to be bad code: if it didn't suck, it would still be in use. Maybe it had some useful gems in it? Possible, but doubtful: usefully gems should have been in a common library, not a cesspool application.

    A final benefit was that it made paying the programmers much easier. The author of 10K lines of code that were being used got paid a lot more than the author of 20K lines of code that were deleted.

  7. Re: by Gorobei · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was lucky enough to have a 10+ MLOC codebase, plus version control history on 500+ developers going back 10 years. After writing a shredder/hasher to look for cut and paste programming, was pretty easy to divide commits into new development vs "maintenance." This gave rough $/line numbers.

    Then asked a number of developers to estimate their time spent checking/maintaining compatibility with existing code. Numbers mostly agreed with the version control numbers.

    Finally, went to some managers and asked how much they would pay to have 1K, 10K, 100K LOCs removed. Again, numbers matched reasonably well.

    I don't claim science here: estimates varied from $1 to $100 per line, but $10 was a number most people were comfortable with.