Re: Motivation of software professionals
On Feb 13, 4:27 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
On 2010-02-13, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote:
Logically, I think that most of the techniques necessary for
making really high quality software would be difficult to
apply in the context of a free development.
They might be hard to apply, but consider that a great deal of
free software is written without idiots saying "you need to
get this done sooner so we can book revenue this quarter to
please shareholders".
If your point is that some (most?) commercial vendors don't have
a good development process, I already pointed that out.
It's also often written by particularly good developers, who
care about their code.
That I don't believe. I've seen a lot of particularly good
developers in industry as well. People who care about their
code---in fact, one of the most important things in creating a
good process is to get people to care about their code.
It is also probably an influence that free software writers
expect the code itself to get feedback, not just the behavior
of the application. I have submitted bug reports about
poorly-expressed code, not just about code which didn't work.
In a well run development process, such feedback is guaranteed,
not just "expected". That's what code reviews are for.
And at least up to a point, they actually reduce the cost of
development. So theoretically, the quality of commercial
software should be considerably higher than that of free
software.
Again, I don't think there's actually any force driving that.
The benefits of well-written software are significant enough
that it is likely worth it to some people to improve software
they have access to, and if it's worth it to them to do that,
it costs them virtually nothing to release the improvements.
Free software often ends up with the best efforts of hundreds
of skilled programmers, with active filtering in place to keep
badly-written code from sneaking in.
I'm far from sure about the "often", and I have serious doubts
about "hundreds"---you don't want hundreds of cooks spoiling the
broth---but that's more or less the case for the best run
freeware projects. Which is no different from the best run
commercial organizations, with the difference that the
commercial organization has more power to enforce the rules it
sets.
And Subversion is at least as good as any of the version
management tools, excepted ClearCase (and the two really
address different models of development).
If you are implying that CC is actually usable to you, that
marks a first in my experience. No one else I've known has
ever found it preferable to any of the open source tools, of
which git is probably currently the most elegant.
ClearCase is by far the best version management system for
large, well run projects. It's a bit overkill for smaller
things, and it causes no end of problems if the project isn't
correctly managed (but what doesn't), but for any project over
about five or six people, I'd rather use ClearCase than anything
else.
I think that part of the problem is that a mistake in a
program will affect every instance of the program. Most
recalls for cars, on the other hand, only affect a small
subset of the total production.
Another issue is that, if you give away open source software,
people can modify it. If you modify my code, and your
modification is not itself buggy, and my code is not itself
buggy, but your modification causes some part of my code not
to work as expected, whose fault is that? This kind of thing
is a lot more complicated with code than it is with physical
objects. You don't have a million people using a bridge, and
a couple hundred thousand of them are using the bridge
recompiled for sports cars, and another couple hundred
thousand are running it with a third-party tollbooth
extension.
That is, of course, a weakness of free software. A company
using it, however, should be able to manage this (although I
once worked for a company where one employee would slip
modifications into the g++ we were trying to use for production
code, without telling anyone).
--
James Kanze