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Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux



On 9 Dec 2003 at 22:31, Russell McOrmond wrote:

To not do so produces substantially inferior work. You should
seriously question how good your programming can ever possibly be
with those attitudes.

  For an engineer my work may seem to be inferior work.  Evaluated from
a public policy point of view your work in this area would seem
inferior as you don't seem to recognize that software can be far more
than just an solution to an engineering problem.  For some types of
software whether something is inferior from an engineering standpoint
is largely irrelevant.

Surely you must then see that this leads inevitably to Microsoft-
style production of whatever the least standard customers will put up
with?

This then knocks on to negatively affecting all society and our
civilisation. Just the financial costs of MS software crashes
worldwide are staggering and the constant viruses and worms can only
grow worse with time. The UK government has lost tens of billions on
failed IT projects. This problem is endemic - why?

Software is first and foremost an engineering solution. It cannot be
anything else. And as all engineering solutions are tools layered
upon by other tools, a high quality standard is essential so a
pyramid does not become a cliff. I should add that while the quality
is Linux is on average better than Windows, it's hardly steller
either (think how VMS had one root exploit ever in its entire
history).

There is a myth that generating quality software costs too much or is
impractical. Yet Brookes' studies at IBM show that it costs maybe 20%
more to write but would likely save far more in maintanence and
extendability. The single biggest way of saving on costs is to reuse
as much quality software as possible something not enabled by the GPL
for the vast majority of software production.

As I've said before, this more than anything else makes the GPL
fundamentally broken and choosing it an act as bad as closing the
source. The GPL is bad for software.

Cheers,
Niall






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