From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 10:25:22 MDT
Felix Ungman wrote:
>
> 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.
No, you'll attempt to obfuscate it by your own prejudices.
Please listen and attempt to understand before applying such
"translation".
>
> >- 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.
>
No. It is not market competition. It is recreating X needed by
multiple companies of diverse types because that X is to date
not efficiently marketable as a separate component and when it
is marketed as such immediately loses value because of the
nature of the type of X it is. Software cannot be treated as if
it was a simple material good or even as an indivisible service.
> >- 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.
>
The entire concept of "end-user" is over-applied when it comes
to software. A large part of the "end-user" community are
themselves software people or employ software people. To sell
them a closed package based on a market image instead of a real
and visible body of code is not normal business nor efficient
marketing.
> >- 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.
>
Again, I mean that this does not work to produce optimum quality
software or to grow the practice of software. Paying for what
is scarce, good software people and their efforts, does not
require tying the acquiring of the money to particular closed
packagings of software produced.
> >- 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.
>
My point stands. Open source projects typically have open bug
reporting and tracking databases and are much more efficient at
finding and correcting errors.
> >- 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.
>
Utterly false. It does not end with an executable. In many
ways, that is only the beginning.
> >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?
>
No, I precisely do not mean that. I have got to run to work.
More of this later. But please do reread with a more open mind.
- samantha
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