From: Felix Ungman (felix@hu.se)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 04:26:09 MDT
On tisdag 19 juni 2001 08.44, Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com> wrote:
>If you want to know what
>has made software the bottleneck to the future that we dream of
>then you might want to consider closely the effects of closed
>software business practices on the software industry. These
>effects include:
I'll try to translate what you try say below.
>- endless duplication of software even though much of that
>software cross-cuts any particular single or type of business;
You mean the principle of sound market competition.
>- selling hype and sizzle with the meat never actually shown and
>the user even forbiddent to look for it;
Describing the product for the end user in non-technical terms, so that he'll able to understand *what* the product does without having to know *how*. Marketing in short.
>- deciding software engineering practices, environments and
>languages on what the minimum was to persuade customers to buy
>your product and basically on what you could get away with
>rather than actual sound software engineering.
You mean project budget. The fact the engineers need a salary to be able to eat.
>- cynically calculating the number of users who would actually
>raise a stink over the bugs in your system versus the cost of
>producing better code and then charging victims for reporting
>the fact of your product's failure;
That fact that no software is ever free of errors. That the "perfect" program never ships.
>- picking languages on the basis of how many programmers you
>could hire how quickly rather on the quality of insight and
>development that would result from choosing a particular
>language.
The language is only means to an end - the running executable. Plus, sound principles trancend language.
>A software package is composed of and/or dependent on many
>hundreds to even thousands of separate routines and bits of
>functionality. To wrap up particular collections and hide the
>contents behind ironclad EULAs, DMCA, UCITA and the like freezes
>what should of been a flow of living software elements and
>techniques into a bit of over-priced consumer ware that
>generally promises to not be legally held suitable for anything
>at all.
You mean, like a car composed of thousends of separate pieces of steel, assembled by large companies and selled for profit. How awful?
>Closing the source makes it extremely difficult to know enough
>about a piece of code to reuse it. It makes it impossible to
>know the code it uses that you might usefully extract and use in
>some other setting. Back in the beginning of OO programming it
>was obvious to many of us that true OO encapsulation and reuse
>could not be acheived without opening the source. To our shame,
>many of us forgot this for far too long.
Fortunately, the OO people thought up other mechanisms to deal with it: interfaces and abstract types. In fact, the concept of interface makes you *want* to forget implementation.
>I am cursed to be an "old-timer" in this field. I have been
>around long enough to see how much stagnation there is in this
>field. And I lay much of it at the closed software industry's
>door.
Stagnation, Excuse me? Couldn't it just be that you haven't upgraded you computer for a while?
> Where is my incentive to produce clean code well factored
>into easy to reuse components available to all makers of
>software when I can get much more money by closing the code and
>selling a bloated package, say a MS Word, that is easier to sell
>for an inflated price because it is closed and has a huge number
>of features most of which you neither want or need. But it is a
>"standard" so you will buy it along with the next version of the
>"standard" that breaks the old version with incompatible formats
>that you are powerless to fix or to hire someone to fix.
As an end-user you prefer a one-stop-shop solution. If Word solves your problem (and then some) thats excellent. And being able to share information is critical, wheter it's standard or just "standard". If not, pick another one.
>Building good development tools does not give anywhere near the
>ROI that building some proprietary package that you can lock
>customers into does. For the development tools to be really
>good they have to be open enough to be evolved, to be modified
>to local needs, the needs of projects and organizations and as
>seed stock for the production of even better tools. In short
>they cannot be closed.
The open source movement is driven by hobbyists that like to tinker with software for the fun of it. It's nothing wrong with that, but it's an esoteric activity. Software produced by open source advocates tend to be software for use by open source advocates, rarely fitted for the technically illiterate end-user. The product follows from the incentive.
>If we are serious about reaching singularity as fast as we
>possibly can then it is imperative that our software, the very
>algorithms, tools and methods that the SI and nanotech and most
>of our researches and development efforts depend on are composed
>of, be as maximized in effectiveness and in as widespread use as
>possible. We need an information and information processing
>commons with as few barriers to entry and use and recombination
>as possible. This is my strongest reason for advocating
>free/open source.
What we need is a society where it's possible to make money on intellectual activity. Only in such a legal framework will we be able to value this activity. We want to be able to trade our services, transform our skills into products for our customers, as well as wealth for ourselves. Otherwise we'll be doomed to a life as the self-supporting farmer on the open commons of computation.
/felix
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:11 MST