You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees.
The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won. You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.
Beekeeping
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their fathers' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of the money.
Out Of Control
Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every word they say.
Smoked Out
The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played golf with some sphincter i
1) Create an AI and email it to aliens 2) ??? 3) Profit!
All kidding aside, this article is lame. Starting from the premise of an AI is - how should I put this? - poop. At this point, presuming that we can create AI (computable on a Turing machine, no less) is no more plausible than finding aliens to communicate with.
Don't mock strategy games. =) It's quite fun to be able to play out the tactics of who is surrounding whom, and who gets a flanking bonus, and how many of the bad guys get hit by the flame strike, and etc.
Picture this - put a web cam RIGHT next to the projector, aimed down at the table.
Now, on each of your miniatures (the characters, the monsters, etc.) you put a tiny set of LEDs, blinking in a certain pattern.
The webcam can recognize each object by seeing the LEDs blinking in a certain order, and can even figure out which way they are facing.
Now, all of a sudden, you've got your physical objects mapped back into your virtual space. What's the point?
Ragnar (played by Dave) wants to cast a fireball spell. So Dave pulls out the "Spell" miniature, and the DM punches up "Fireball" on a list. Now, as Dave drags the spell miniature around on the board, a little (projected, virtual) dashed line stretches from the Ragnar miniature to the spell miniature. Around the spell miniature is an animation of a fireball exploding, set to the appropriate radius (20' in virtual space.) Dave can easily see if Ragnar's spell can go far enough, and how many people (good guys and bad) would be affected by different placements of the spell.
You also get to immediately measure how many distance increments your character is from the bad guy he's throwing a dagger at.
All sorts of things start turning out to be easy and cool.
Why bother with the physical objects? Because nothing's as cool as reaching out and grabbing something real and moving it interactively (which begs the question of why people play D&D instead of rugby). It's like a mouse to the power of 5. Plus, all the players can fiddle with measurements and stuff simultaneously.
Yes, you could also just pass around a wireless mouse, and move around virtual miniatures, instead. Probably pretty close to the same experience.
Instead of the "look-away" part of what these guys have to do, I think it would be awesome to have a dual-monitor set-up - but not many laptops let you drive two independent monitors. One monitor the players can see, one the DM can see. Drop in a wireless PDA or two for passing messages back and forth between players and DM (Rogue: "I steal the amulet!"), and you're cooking. *grin*
I didn't come up with this webcam + LEDs idea - I just have thought about how it would apply to Dungeons and Dragons. I first saw this kind of set up on a SIGGRAPH DVD, back in 2001. They were using it to play with how buildings would cast shadows and warp wind patterns. They also simulated a virtual holograph-making system. It was amazing to watch this video go. I can't remember the name of the group for the life of me. Can someone post a link? I gotta dig up that DVD!
I'm saying the problems with polygons and rays are the same, when it comes to parallelism.
What you just described is the same in ray tracing as it is in polygon-based rendering : you need geometry to do shadows (or reflections, etc.) That spoils parallelism, to a degree.
Every form of entertainment is a fad - and there will always be new entertainment. It's a sustaining "niche" market.
And again, you're taking what is essentially a niche market
How many thousand niche markets do I have to present, before you start to catch on? They're all niche markets - except food and housing. =)
OSS, by contrast, if the company is to derive any benefit from taking the time to release it and must hosted by the company
The metaphor for recycled paper was better than you realized. I absolutely and completely disagee with the idea behind this comment. If every company ever "threw away" onto SourceForge all of the libraries that they developed at cost and now no longer perceive real value in, and if dedicated and interested parties are willing to sift through it looking for gems, then everyone wins. It's as though the patent office doors swung open. The larger the public domain, the greater the good for the public. I can't imagine why this point is lost on you.
10MB app takes up too much space
You're not serious, are you? 10MB costs less than one cent in IDE HDD space - even if it's in a RAID array, and fully backed up.
A *true* open-source company would release the source immediately, TODAY. Yet you fail to recognize this.
Hah. You get to define the term "true"? Bullshit. I don't give a crap when they open source it. As long as they do it before the code is lost forever, I perceive some benefit from it. It's much like preserving old movies. Hopefully they do it before the copyright lapses, so the movie isn't lost forever.
But techies do not constitute the majority of the market for software.
Wrong - they contribute 100% of the supply side of the market for software. This isn't something to be ignored.
the product that is functional and makes the users happiest wins out
Fine - I'll recycle free components given away by companies who thew things on the OSS pile before the bits on their hard drives faded away, and you start from scratch. I'll be done sooner, as long as enough people are doing a good enough job organizing and catalog what's for free. (See: Boost.) You go ahead and re-invent those wheels.
I don't put much stock in employee happiness...
Are you hiring?
biased sample
I don't think the majority of people will - thanks for putting words in my mouth. I think enough people are good samaritans, that we will all benefit from not ignoring their work, and we'll all benefit even more if we try to help them out every now and then.
level of competition as a real business in the free-market
I don't remember the last time I flew to investigate 13 different product supliers (read: I never have), but I did fly to investigage 13 bachelor programs. I think the competition is pretty intense. Maybe that's just for the top of the class, but that's not to be ignored.
Here's where game theory comes into play.
Wow. You are a piece of work. Okay, one, who says my craplet is free for commercial use? Two, if you find bugs and fix them, I can force you to give me your code, if you want to use my craplet. Three, I just built a team of developers who are competent enough to build a business-critical application, and you downloaded some piece of crap off the web. Who's in a better position to support the growing needs of their corporation? Fourth, who says I developed it alone? Given the choice between having input on a project, and not having input on a project, which would you rather have? That means that I'm going to have far more say in how the craplet behaves - if that's important, I win. These are not factors you can ignore.
I guess it comes down to - you're a conservative, and I'm a liberal. (Read Lakoff, if I'm not making myself clear, here.)
How on earth was it in the public's interest to out a CIA agent?
Use small words, because apparently I'm a moron.
If you want to say that outing Plame was merely the means to some greater end (an end which justifies those means), then say that - because what you've said makes no sense.
I personally see the ends as being political retribution - not something that I value.
I disagee with your assertion that this is the trend for "amost any" product. There are many products where this is not the case; basketball shoes, sports cars, jewelry - basically luxury or "image defining" goods.
Some people identify with their software - video games, P2P software, even operating systems and document editing software.
These are all because the price of the product matters.
Yes, that's true - but you're completely ignoring the times when it doesn't matter, or when it matters in the exact opposite way you think it does.
Value is often perception
Value is only perception - and sometimes peer pressure comes crashing down.
Until then, if you don't want anything for your work, I won't give you anything for it.
You're mixing the terms of value and cost. They're quite different.
It's not a sustainable business model to sell things that people can get for free elsewhere, unless you can (as you mention) maintain an image that justifies it.
You're forgetting the fourth dimension. As I mentioned with id software, they give away for free their software a few years after its commercial run. For them, it is a sustainable business model to sell video games that people can get for free elsewhere (in time).
Your argument against giving away software for free completely ignores this point.
Image then, is a short-term fix to a long-term problem; it's the sizzle on the steak, not the steak itself.
A business image is different than a cultural image - again you mixed terms to make your point. "Air Jordan" is about 1e14 times more valuable than "Air Gates," even if Gates is more solvent.
there isn't a lot of "image" or "prestige" to be gained by using one piece of software over another
Have you met a Mac user? =) Or a gamer? Haven't you seen holy wars over software? People are passionate about these things because they personally identify with them. If you can figure out a way to make people personally identify with a product, then you should go into marketing now!
fairly-unique
Something is unique or not, adjectives need not apply.
OSS is simply unsustainable as a business model
That's like saying "spending money on marketing is unsustainable as a business model." It's something you can do - it has very little to do with what kind of product you're making.
OSS developers require an income
Last I checked John Carmack makes a pretty penny.
Of these, the first and last are the only sustainable ones, and the last one, as I've been arguing, doesn't seem terribly sustainable from a business standpoint.
Yes, that's what you've been arguing. And you're wrong. =) Software's value goes down in time. At a certain point, there's no harm in giving it away for free - true of almost any software.
Maybe think about a company that recycles its office paper. At one point, what was on the paper had value to the company - or else they wouldn't have printed it. The value of the sheet of paper can range tremendously (especially if it's time-critical information). But the company doesn't lose anything, when it recycles paper. Many companies don't lose anything, when they release OSS. They don't exist to recycle paper, or to release OSS - but it can be a benefit for people down the line without hurting anyone.
Why should a company dedicate time and money and resources beyond that which they've already invested in the software, in order to release it to the public?
Because as you're fond of pointing out, it's very cheap for a company to do - the cost to replicate software is essentially zero. =) Why do companies bother to recycle paper?
Given that OSS is free as in beer, users will naturally gravitate towards it and promote it.
Explain why people buy Windows, and why people buy bottled water. Users do not automatically gravitate to the product with the lowest cost, and sometimes increasing the price of a product increases demand.
makes the value of developers' time equal $0
...to you. The interesting part is that value is only real because we say it is. If you say something has a value of $0, and I say it has a value of $10, it probably has a value of $10 (or more.)
how your work saved time [for] somebody else in the company
This is the eternal problem of development - and its why it is difficult to convince management to allow you to refactor code. It is difficult to impossible to convince them using words they can understand, on any basis other than emotion (or politics.) The same way that refactoring from one design to a better design is an investment in the future, so to can be developing open source software.
You cannot very long sell a product at a non-zero monetary sum that which one can get at zero monetary cost to themselves.
You're essentially saying "you can never charge more than your competitors for the same product." This is simply not true. There's clearly two exploitations: image and information. The very idea of a product has value - that's image. And again, you're assuming that consumers have all the available information. Consumers often don't care, or are too lazy to find that information.
Why on earth would anyone buy a cigarette? It's because they don't know or don't care about the negative side-effects. In essense, I say that a cigarette has negative value, even though the product can bear a much higher cost in the market. You say OSS has a zero value, even though OSS products can clearly bear a much higher cost in the market.
OSS coders are literally coding their way out of their own jobs.
You're forgetting incidental development. A company could sell CAD software and give away free a GUI development kit. In no way does one impact the other, in practical terms. This is because GUI development kits are a commodity. You have to chose one, but they are ubiquitous and essentially have zero cost already. Releasing a new package as OSS essentially stretches the envelope of what is commodity - and that will never end. Presuming that there will some day be an end to development (because of OSS or any other reason) is like saying that the patent office can close soon, because everything interesting has already been patented.
The problem with refering to software as a commons is that your use of a specific piece of software in no way harms my use of it (under normal circumstances.)
Hence, in my argument to this point, there is no incentive whatsoever for companies with any value on their intellectual property at all to contribute back to the community.
I know you're just trolling, but I feel I must respond. You're forgetting the relationship between intellectual property and public domain. Essentially new ideas, and ideas which are so commonplace that they have no additional value - but they're still non-trivial. You can't claim that releasing to OSS a slightly better interface for file manipulation would harm just about any company. That's because file manipulation is "solved" but potentially still "difficult."
Also, if it makes the developers happier to occasionally release OSS, it makes it more likely they'll stay at their job. Clearly that has some value to a company.
Finally, you're forgetting non-profit companies, and academia. A university is a business just like any other, and I fail to see how releasing OSS (and increasing their academic reputation) harms a university. That's because what their consumers (students) are buying (an education) is totally different from w
Sure - everything works great if you are fortunate enough to start with clean code, and keep your code clean.
But the rest of us work for a living. You know, for bosses who don't "Get It." =) We have to fight for the time to keep code clean, because that time could be spent adding features instead. It can be a hard battle.
When you're in that kind of environment, comments can save your life. Or at least your ass.
If you count particle effects, by quantity "most" of the physics could happen on the client side.
In other words, yes, you're right - the server should never trust the client to do critical computation or even to have critical data. But for things which do not or can not impact the consensual world state (such as the precise way in which rain behaves pittering on concrete, or hail bouncing off buildings, or [insert cheesy physics/graphics effect here]) it should be fine.
Good lord, you call that contrived? Haven't you ever gotten source code with comments in a language you can't read? So, that's one half of my example...
And for the other half... Haven't you ever gotten design specifications with no code? This happens in reverse engineering all the time, for one. It also happens when you're trying to implement a research paper without source. Or when you're implementing what's in a patent - possibly because you licensed the patent but not the source.
Those are absolutely not "contrived examples"! And they're not a "false choice." They really happen.
And I think you should read my other post on the subject, to see how important design docs are in having maintainable code.
Huh. Interesting. I can see how in a critical application space that would be tremendously valuable. Like, if you need guaranteed uptime. You can't test everything, but you can statistically hit a bunch of important stuff, in a semi- or mostly- automated manner.
I can see how you could do it for C++ - you would need new libraries. Math, memory, file access, networking, etc.
But isn't part of QA in manufacturing to intentionally introduce an error, and to see if it is caught by your process?
That's a fun thing to contemplate...
Injecting a requirements error, to see if it is caught. Injecting a design error. Injecting a documentation error. Let alone the act of injecting a coding error - like a crash or a memory leak.
Wow. The imagination reels, trying to picture those things being caught repeatably.
For you D&D nerds out there (present and accounted for!), I highly recommend The Order of the Stick. It's just updated Monday and Thursday (soon to be three times a week), but it's excellent.
Jesus. He's not advocating that people should "bypass standard engineering practices."
He's saying that that the best engineering practice in the world is to test the shit out of everything, and be willing to make changes when you find flaws. To find flaws you have to look for them. Looking for flaws in blueprints is hard (you have to simulate, and make assumptions in your simulation, and...). Looking for flaws in a manufactured part is a hell of a lot easier (because you just try to bend the fucking thing and see if it breaks!)
They're both valuable - but given your choice, wouldn't you rather test the real component?
Test the real component! Write unit tests!
It's so sad to hear you all talk about this, because he's actually calling for more rigor, and you all think he's calling for less. Maybe the article is poorly written in that respect, but it's a shame to see you throw away some of his ideas and conclusions on the basis of an easily-corrected misunderstanding.
....and what exactly have you contributed to this discussion?
=)
I thought the article was well-written and made some interesting points. It's started a pretty cool conversation with several of my peers, and we're reaching interesting conclusions. Between us we have a bunch of degrees in various aspects of software engineering. You're some dick on Slashdot. =) I'm not putting you down, I'm just saying that we're having an interesting conversation based on this article and you're flinging poop. Not so impressive, guy. =)
You could join in the discussion, or you could arrogantly state that it's "freaking obvious and unimpressive." Fine. If there's nothing for you to gain in the discussion, move on. Or write your own damn article.
Personally, I'm more interested in what you have to say, than in hearing about how dumb you think I am and this article is. One's constructive - one's just assinine.
Especially because he never fucking said that you should "Jump straight into coding without a design document," (he actually said the opposite!) which makes you just look like a moron.
I think the most valuable point of this, which he didn't really harp on - is that if you change a single line of source code, you've changed the design. If you do that late in a beta-cycle, you might be really screwing up. Everyone knows what it means to "change the design," we all get that we have to go back and test the hell out of it. But if we "just change a single line of source code," the understanding of how to test that is pretty squishy.
He's actually calling for more rigor, rather than less, in considering the importance of a single line of code, and testing having an impact on the design...
Oh, and a point I made to a friend - the analogy he makes between HW and SW is interesting - because in HW you can test components as you build them. But the build process in SW is so atomic that we can't interject tests into it. Which is why unit tests are so unbelievably important! They're your only chance to test the individual components in a "repeatable process" kind of way, as people always do in serious manufacturing.
I agree with you - it's kind of a "be the design!" idiotic way to make those kinds of points, but I think there's gold in them thar hills. This article may not embody the most valuable or useful or productive way to communicate those ideas - but I think it's an interesting seed for discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Or even better, a TV series based on David Weber's Honor Harrington character, possibly back at Saganami Island.
And maybe get Famke Jansen to play Honor Harrington.
Academy, yes.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, no.
I think it would be fun, but it's entirely too self-indulgent (surprise!) of Shatner to base it on those three characters.
This topic somewhat reminds me of this:
http://www.infobear.com/howswdie.shtml
Windows Made Me This Way
How Software Companies Die
Windows Sources, March 1995, p. 208
By: Orson Scott Card
You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees.
The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won. You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.
Beekeeping
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their fathers' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of the money.
Out Of Control
Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every word they say.
Smoked Out
The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played golf with some sphincter i
Do you have a reference for this?
1) Create an AI and email it to aliens
2) ???
3) Profit!
All kidding aside, this article is lame. Starting from the premise of an AI is - how should I put this? - poop. At this point, presuming that we can create AI (computable on a Turing machine, no less) is no more plausible than finding aliens to communicate with.
Don't mock strategy games. =) It's quite fun to be able to play out the tactics of who is surrounding whom, and who gets a flanking bonus, and how many of the bad guys get hit by the flame strike, and etc.
Picture this - put a web cam RIGHT next to the projector, aimed down at the table.
Now, on each of your miniatures (the characters, the monsters, etc.) you put a tiny set of LEDs, blinking in a certain pattern.
The webcam can recognize each object by seeing the LEDs blinking in a certain order, and can even figure out which way they are facing.
Now, all of a sudden, you've got your physical objects mapped back into your virtual space. What's the point?
Ragnar (played by Dave) wants to cast a fireball spell. So Dave pulls out the "Spell" miniature, and the DM punches up "Fireball" on a list. Now, as Dave drags the spell miniature around on the board, a little (projected, virtual) dashed line stretches from the Ragnar miniature to the spell miniature. Around the spell miniature is an animation of a fireball exploding, set to the appropriate radius (20' in virtual space.) Dave can easily see if Ragnar's spell can go far enough, and how many people (good guys and bad) would be affected by different placements of the spell.
You also get to immediately measure how many distance increments your character is from the bad guy he's throwing a dagger at.
All sorts of things start turning out to be easy and cool.
Why bother with the physical objects? Because nothing's as cool as reaching out and grabbing something real and moving it interactively (which begs the question of why people play D&D instead of rugby). It's like a mouse to the power of 5. Plus, all the players can fiddle with measurements and stuff simultaneously.
Yes, you could also just pass around a wireless mouse, and move around virtual miniatures, instead. Probably pretty close to the same experience.
Instead of the "look-away" part of what these guys have to do, I think it would be awesome to have a dual-monitor set-up - but not many laptops let you drive two independent monitors. One monitor the players can see, one the DM can see. Drop in a wireless PDA or two for passing messages back and forth between players and DM (Rogue: "I steal the amulet!"), and you're cooking. *grin*
I didn't come up with this webcam + LEDs idea - I just have thought about how it would apply to Dungeons and Dragons. I first saw this kind of set up on a SIGGRAPH DVD, back in 2001. They were using it to play with how buildings would cast shadows and warp wind patterns. They also simulated a virtual holograph-making system. It was amazing to watch this video go. I can't remember the name of the group for the life of me. Can someone post a link? I gotta dig up that DVD!
Hey AC,
I'm saying the problems with polygons and rays are the same, when it comes to parallelism.
What you just described is the same in ray tracing as it is in polygon-based rendering : you need geometry to do shadows (or reflections, etc.) That spoils parallelism, to a degree.
Unlimited parallelism.
Not true. The geometry still needs to be distributed to whatever it is that you want to parallelize - threads, processors, or computers.
That can be a rather severe limit on parallelism.
P.S. The exact same thing is true of polygon-based rendering - massive parallelism with a few limitations.
Wow. Funny. Liberals normally get attacked for being weak on national defense.
Some conservative asshole with an axe to grind outs a CIA agent, and now I'm a "frothing crazed biased liberal."
What topics do you take seriously? Apple insiders?
Games are fads. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Every form of entertainment is a fad - and there will always be new entertainment. It's a sustaining "niche" market.
And again, you're taking what is essentially a niche market
How many thousand niche markets do I have to present, before you start to catch on? They're all niche markets - except food and housing. =)
OSS, by contrast, if the company is to derive any benefit from taking the time to release it and must hosted by the company
The metaphor for recycled paper was better than you realized. I absolutely and completely disagee with the idea behind this comment. If every company ever "threw away" onto SourceForge all of the libraries that they developed at cost and now no longer perceive real value in, and if dedicated and interested parties are willing to sift through it looking for gems, then everyone wins. It's as though the patent office doors swung open. The larger the public domain, the greater the good for the public. I can't imagine why this point is lost on you.
10MB app takes up too much space
You're not serious, are you? 10MB costs less than one cent in IDE HDD space - even if it's in a RAID array, and fully backed up.
A *true* open-source company would release the source immediately, TODAY. Yet you fail to recognize this.
Hah. You get to define the term "true"? Bullshit. I don't give a crap when they open source it. As long as they do it before the code is lost forever, I perceive some benefit from it. It's much like preserving old movies. Hopefully they do it before the copyright lapses, so the movie isn't lost forever.
But techies do not constitute the majority of the market for software.
Wrong - they contribute 100% of the supply side of the market for software. This isn't something to be ignored.
the product that is functional and makes the users happiest wins out
Fine - I'll recycle free components given away by companies who thew things on the OSS pile before the bits on their hard drives faded away, and you start from scratch. I'll be done sooner, as long as enough people are doing a good enough job organizing and catalog what's for free. (See: Boost.) You go ahead and re-invent those wheels.
I don't put much stock in employee happiness...
Are you hiring?
biased sample
I don't think the majority of people will - thanks for putting words in my mouth. I think enough people are good samaritans, that we will all benefit from not ignoring their work, and we'll all benefit even more if we try to help them out every now and then.
level of competition as a real business in the free-market
I don't remember the last time I flew to investigate 13 different product supliers (read: I never have), but I did fly to investigage 13 bachelor programs. I think the competition is pretty intense. Maybe that's just for the top of the class, but that's not to be ignored.
Here's where game theory comes into play.
Wow. You are a piece of work. Okay, one, who says my craplet is free for commercial use? Two, if you find bugs and fix them, I can force you to give me your code, if you want to use my craplet. Three, I just built a team of developers who are competent enough to build a business-critical application, and you downloaded some piece of crap off the web. Who's in a better position to support the growing needs of their corporation? Fourth, who says I developed it alone? Given the choice between having input on a project, and not having input on a project, which would you rather have? That means that I'm going to have far more say in how the craplet behaves - if that's important, I win. These are not factors you can ignore.
I guess it comes down to - you're a conservative, and I'm a liberal. (Read Lakoff, if I'm not making myself clear, here.)
The example you c
How on earth was it in the public's interest to out a CIA agent?
Use small words, because apparently I'm a moron.
If you want to say that outing Plame was merely the means to some greater end (an end which justifies those means), then say that - because what you've said makes no sense.
I personally see the ends as being political retribution - not something that I value.
Saying that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law
Re-read the words "someone breaking the law."
Saying that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law
It's about time Robert Novak was thrown in jail for outing Valerie Plame!
Oh - we're just talking about Apple insiders? Who gives a fuck?
more product for less money
I disagee with your assertion that this is the trend for "amost any" product. There are many products where this is not the case; basketball shoes, sports cars, jewelry - basically luxury or "image defining" goods.
Some people identify with their software - video games, P2P software, even operating systems and document editing software.
These are all because the price of the product matters.
Yes, that's true - but you're completely ignoring the times when it doesn't matter, or when it matters in the exact opposite way you think it does.
Value is often perception
Value is only perception - and sometimes peer pressure comes crashing down.
Until then, if you don't want anything for your work, I won't give you anything for it.
You're mixing the terms of value and cost. They're quite different.
It's not a sustainable business model to sell things that people can get for free elsewhere, unless you can (as you mention) maintain an image that justifies it.
You're forgetting the fourth dimension. As I mentioned with id software, they give away for free their software a few years after its commercial run. For them, it is a sustainable business model to sell video games that people can get for free elsewhere (in time).
Your argument against giving away software for free completely ignores this point.
Image then, is a short-term fix to a long-term problem; it's the sizzle on the steak, not the steak itself.
A business image is different than a cultural image - again you mixed terms to make your point. "Air Jordan" is about 1e14 times more valuable than "Air Gates," even if Gates is more solvent.
there isn't a lot of "image" or "prestige" to be gained by using one piece of software over another
Have you met a Mac user? =) Or a gamer? Haven't you seen holy wars over software? People are passionate about these things because they personally identify with them. If you can figure out a way to make people personally identify with a product, then you should go into marketing now!
fairly-unique
Something is unique or not, adjectives need not apply.
OSS is simply unsustainable as a business model
That's like saying "spending money on marketing is unsustainable as a business model." It's something you can do - it has very little to do with what kind of product you're making.
OSS developers require an income
Last I checked John Carmack makes a pretty penny.
Of these, the first and last are the only sustainable ones, and the last one, as I've been arguing, doesn't seem terribly sustainable from a business standpoint.
Yes, that's what you've been arguing. And you're wrong. =) Software's value goes down in time. At a certain point, there's no harm in giving it away for free - true of almost any software.
Maybe think about a company that recycles its office paper. At one point, what was on the paper had value to the company - or else they wouldn't have printed it. The value of the sheet of paper can range tremendously (especially if it's time-critical information). But the company doesn't lose anything, when it recycles paper. Many companies don't lose anything, when they release OSS. They don't exist to recycle paper, or to release OSS - but it can be a benefit for people down the line without hurting anyone.
Why should a company dedicate time and money and resources beyond that which they've already invested in the software, in order to release it to the public?
Because as you're fond of pointing out, it's very cheap for a company to do - the cost to replicate software is essentially zero. =) Why do companies bother to recycle paper?
there is no benefit to releasing it publicly
Explain why people buy Windows, and why people buy bottled water. Users do not automatically gravitate to the product with the lowest cost, and sometimes increasing the price of a product increases demand.
makes the value of developers' time equal $0
how your work saved time [for] somebody else in the company
This is the eternal problem of development - and its why it is difficult to convince management to allow you to refactor code. It is difficult to impossible to convince them using words they can understand, on any basis other than emotion (or politics.) The same way that refactoring from one design to a better design is an investment in the future, so to can be developing open source software.
You cannot very long sell a product at a non-zero monetary sum that which one can get at zero monetary cost to themselves.
You're essentially saying "you can never charge more than your competitors for the same product." This is simply not true. There's clearly two exploitations: image and information. The very idea of a product has value - that's image. And again, you're assuming that consumers have all the available information. Consumers often don't care, or are too lazy to find that information.
Why on earth would anyone buy a cigarette? It's because they don't know or don't care about the negative side-effects. In essense, I say that a cigarette has negative value, even though the product can bear a much higher cost in the market. You say OSS has a zero value, even though OSS products can clearly bear a much higher cost in the market.
OSS coders are literally coding their way out of their own jobs.
You're forgetting incidental development. A company could sell CAD software and give away free a GUI development kit. In no way does one impact the other, in practical terms. This is because GUI development kits are a commodity. You have to chose one, but they are ubiquitous and essentially have zero cost already. Releasing a new package as OSS essentially stretches the envelope of what is commodity - and that will never end. Presuming that there will some day be an end to development (because of OSS or any other reason) is like saying that the patent office can close soon, because everything interesting has already been patented.
The problem with refering to software as a commons is that your use of a specific piece of software in no way harms my use of it (under normal circumstances.)
Hence, in my argument to this point, there is no incentive whatsoever for companies with any value on their intellectual property at all to contribute back to the community.
I know you're just trolling, but I feel I must respond. You're forgetting the relationship between intellectual property and public domain. Essentially new ideas, and ideas which are so commonplace that they have no additional value - but they're still non-trivial. You can't claim that releasing to OSS a slightly better interface for file manipulation would harm just about any company. That's because file manipulation is "solved" but potentially still "difficult."
Also, if it makes the developers happier to occasionally release OSS, it makes it more likely they'll stay at their job. Clearly that has some value to a company.
Finally, you're forgetting non-profit companies, and academia. A university is a business just like any other, and I fail to see how releasing OSS (and increasing their academic reputation) harms a university. That's because what their consumers (students) are buying (an education) is totally different from w
Sure - everything works great if you are fortunate enough to start with clean code, and keep your code clean.
But the rest of us work for a living. You know, for bosses who don't "Get It." =) We have to fight for the time to keep code clean, because that time could be spent adding features instead. It can be a hard battle.
When you're in that kind of environment, comments can save your life. Or at least your ass.
Depends on what you mean by "most."
If you count particle effects, by quantity "most" of the physics could happen on the client side.
In other words, yes, you're right - the server should never trust the client to do critical computation or even to have critical data. But for things which do not or can not impact the consensual world state (such as the precise way in which rain behaves pittering on concrete, or hail bouncing off buildings, or [insert cheesy physics/graphics effect here]) it should be fine.
Good lord, you call that contrived? Haven't you ever gotten source code with comments in a language you can't read? So, that's one half of my example...
And for the other half... Haven't you ever gotten design specifications with no code? This happens in reverse engineering all the time, for one. It also happens when you're trying to implement a research paper without source. Or when you're implementing what's in a patent - possibly because you licensed the patent but not the source.
Those are absolutely not "contrived examples"! And they're not a "false choice." They really happen.
And I think you should read my other post on the subject, to see how important design docs are in having maintainable code.
Huh. Interesting. I can see how in a critical application space that would be tremendously valuable. Like, if you need guaranteed uptime. You can't test everything, but you can statistically hit a bunch of important stuff, in a semi- or mostly- automated manner.
I can see how you could do it for C++ - you would need new libraries. Math, memory, file access, networking, etc.
Cool.
Kind of an off-the-topic question...
But isn't part of QA in manufacturing to intentionally introduce an error, and to see if it is caught by your process?
That's a fun thing to contemplate...
Injecting a requirements error, to see if it is caught. Injecting a design error. Injecting a documentation error. Let alone the act of injecting a coding error - like a crash or a memory leak.
Wow. The imagination reels, trying to picture those things being caught repeatably.
For you D&D nerds out there (present and accounted for!), I highly recommend The Order of the Stick. It's just updated Monday and Thursday (soon to be three times a week), but it's excellent.
Jesus. He's not advocating that people should "bypass standard engineering practices."
He's saying that that the best engineering practice in the world is to test the shit out of everything, and be willing to make changes when you find flaws. To find flaws you have to look for them. Looking for flaws in blueprints is hard (you have to simulate, and make assumptions in your simulation, and...). Looking for flaws in a manufactured part is a hell of a lot easier (because you just try to bend the fucking thing and see if it breaks!)
They're both valuable - but given your choice, wouldn't you rather test the real component?
Test the real component! Write unit tests!
It's so sad to hear you all talk about this, because he's actually calling for more rigor, and you all think he's calling for less. Maybe the article is poorly written in that respect, but it's a shame to see you throw away some of his ideas and conclusions on the basis of an easily-corrected misunderstanding.
....and what exactly have you contributed to this discussion?
=)
I thought the article was well-written and made some interesting points. It's started a pretty cool conversation with several of my peers, and we're reaching interesting conclusions. Between us we have a bunch of degrees in various aspects of software engineering. You're some dick on Slashdot. =) I'm not putting you down, I'm just saying that we're having an interesting conversation based on this article and you're flinging poop. Not so impressive, guy. =)
You could join in the discussion, or you could arrogantly state that it's "freaking obvious and unimpressive." Fine. If there's nothing for you to gain in the discussion, move on. Or write your own damn article.
Personally, I'm more interested in what you have to say, than in hearing about how dumb you think I am and this article is. One's constructive - one's just assinine.
Especially because he never fucking said that you should "Jump straight into coding without a design document," (he actually said the opposite!) which makes you just look like a moron.
Groovy - you win points. =)
I think the most valuable point of this, which he didn't really harp on - is that if you change a single line of source code, you've changed the design. If you do that late in a beta-cycle, you might be really screwing up. Everyone knows what it means to "change the design," we all get that we have to go back and test the hell out of it. But if we "just change a single line of source code," the understanding of how to test that is pretty squishy.
He's actually calling for more rigor, rather than less, in considering the importance of a single line of code, and testing having an impact on the design...
Oh, and a point I made to a friend - the analogy he makes between HW and SW is interesting - because in HW you can test components as you build them. But the build process in SW is so atomic that we can't interject tests into it. Which is why unit tests are so unbelievably important! They're your only chance to test the individual components in a "repeatable process" kind of way, as people always do in serious manufacturing.
I agree with you - it's kind of a "be the design!" idiotic way to make those kinds of points, but I think there's gold in them thar hills. This article may not embody the most valuable or useful or productive way to communicate those ideas - but I think it's an interesting seed for discussion.