On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 05:07:35PM -0600, Brent Michalski wrote:
>
> Had this been Open Source, we would have fixed the problem ourselves....
Ah, if only that was true. Then Perl wouldn't have long outstanding bugs.
Fixing bugs is hard. Fixing bugs in other peoples code is even harder.
Fixing it right is yet even harder.
You hear it often "with Open Source, you can fix the bugs yourself".
Lots of company don't even make the time to fix the bugs in their own
products. They do it for economic reasons. A model were software is
written, open sourced, distributed, and users should just fix their own
bugs is economically not feasable.
I spend most of my time at work cleaning up the mess caused by
the mistakes in the past; the rest of my time I spend doing whatever
sysadmins do. If I need something done, and the choice is between using
Open Source, free-of-charge, fix-the-bugs-yourself $TOOL1 and proprietary,
closed source, $TOOL2 with a yearly support contract of $5000, I most
likely suggest to boss to go for $TOOL2, because THAT IS CHEAPER. [1]
Not to mention that I get little motivation out of debugging someone
else shit. If I even had the necessary knowledge to do so.
We no longer live in the times of Von Neumann who responded to a programmer
suggesting to write a compiler by remarking that programmer time was cheap
and computer time wasn't.
[1] Say, it takes you a day to locate a bug, fix it, and test it. Your time
is worth $200/h. You break even if you encounter about 3 bugs a year.
Abigail
