Re: IBM in talks to buy Sun

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:31:34 -0400

Message-ID:

<49c45187$0$90264$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Mike Schilling wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

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.

None of which would work anything alike. And you can drop the last two
words of that sentence.

At 20 hours per months it would be 10 million man hours per month.

The point is that just 0.01%-0.1% of the user population is
sufficient to keep the project alive.

Provided that a few of them learn the thing well enough to provide leadershp
and oversight.

They will eventually learn. Maybe the first few versions would have
a few "untraditional features", but it is not that different from
any commercial operation where a development team is replaced (handed
over to a dedicated maintenance team or oursourced or ...). It happens.
The trip is a bit bumpy. But usually it eventually comes through. And
waste of hours does not matter for voluntary work.

Arne