The problem with this thesis is that in order to be embarrassed you have to 1) know that you did something wrong, and 2) care. The only people who might know that the code wasn't beautiful are the developers, and who listens to them? To the rest of the company, it doesn't matter if clicking on a button causes some message passing to happen in some elegant MVC architecture, or if it yanks a string tied to the tail of a gerbil on a wheel. As long as the pretty lights happen, then the product is flawless. I think what they're protecting is their customer's perception of the value of their IP. If they open sourced their code, the marketing department would have a much harder time selling their product because they couldn't fall back on the "our product has bigger juju" argument. Who would want to pay for a product that has no visible difference from a lower priced or free product unless the higher cost product had extra magic? Actually creating IP that's worth protecting is really hard, it's much easier to just claim that you have, and hide the truth in closed source.
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The problem with this thesis is that in order to be embarrassed you have to 1) know that you did something wrong,
and 2) care. The only people who might know that the code wasn't beautiful are the developers, and who listens to them? To the rest of the company, it doesn't matter if clicking on a button causes some message passing to happen in some elegant MVC architecture, or if it yanks a string tied to the tail of a gerbil on a wheel. As long as the pretty lights happen, then the product is flawless. I think what they're protecting is their customer's perception of the value of their IP. If they open sourced their code, the marketing department would have a much harder time selling their product because they couldn't fall back on the "our product has bigger juju" argument. Who would want to pay for a product that has no visible difference from a lower priced or free product unless the higher cost product had extra magic? Actually creating IP that's worth protecting is really hard, it's much easier to just claim that you have, and hide the truth in closed source.
In a related story: Perth Zoo has announced the grand opening of it's new OSS Development Center. Based in the Primate House, the Center will...