Re: IBM in talks to buy Sun
Mike Schilling wrote:
Arne Vajh?j wrote:
Users can take over.
"Can" isn't "will". And a big complex codebase is awfully difficult
to support once the expertise goes away. Especially one that (again
if things haven't changed much in the past eight years) is barely
maintainable even by those experts.
But if you need to take over a big complex codebase, then the users
are about as good as they can get.
There are probably 300000-500000 NetBeans users out there.
And every one of them is a Java programmer.
I gotta admit, I'd love to see a product developed by hundreds of thousand
of people. Not use it, mind you, just see it.
It would create some project management problems.
It would also allow the IDE to implement an app server, a word
processor, a spreadsheet, an ERP system, a CRM system and
practically everything else under the sun in no time.
The point is that just 0.01%-0.1% of the user population is
sufficient to keep the project alive.
That is not unrealistic.
Arne