Seth Cohn wrote:
> Sloppy coders are laughed at in the open source world because of the
> sloppy code, and so they are loath to even put stuff out there, because
> in a closed source environment, nobody knows how bad the code is, but when
> everyone can review and patch, bad code sticks out like a sore thumb.
<RANT intensity="incendiary">
I currently work at a (closed source) company whose code base is
worse than most. I've had occasion to think about why it's so
rotten. It's not the developers' fault, for the most part, it's
management's.
Software management has two incentives to minimize the amount of
engineering done on a program. The lesser incentive is the expense,
and the greater incentive is time to market.
Software developers are expensive. At SGI, we budgeted engineers at
$250/hour. No, we didn't get anywhere near that much, but the
various overheads (e.g., space, equipment, support staff) added up
to that much. Anything worth doing has to pay back more than
$250/hour.
And the other thing is time to market. It is widely believed that
the first company to enter a new market has the best chance of
owning it. So companies cut corners everywhere they can to get
something shippable as early as possible. Not something useful.
Not something that works. Just something that's shippable. I see
decisions made every day that will cost us ten days' work later to
save us one day now. This is the "correct" tradeoff in commercial
software.
So, even if a developer wants to write good code, he is often
prevented from it by his boss.
Obviously, software written by volunteers doesn't have either of
these incentives working against it. That's why Windows 2000
shipped in February, and Linux 2.4 hasn't. And it's why I won't
wait for Service Pack 3 before I install Linux 2.4.
</RANT>
I would like to know how commercial open source projects handle this
dilemma. They have the same incentives to deliver crap as commercial
software, it's just more obvious when they do.
PS: Subversion is cool! http://subversion.tigris.org/ (Oh, okay,
it's vaporware, but it's GONNA BE cool! (-: )
--
K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
