Re: [ox-en] the Deleuzian engineer
- From: Robin Green <greenrd greenrd.org>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 03:14:42 +0000
On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 11:22:04PM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
1. Will or will not an engineer who refuses to use certain libraries,
languages and technologies because of political reasons tend on
average to produce lower quality software?
Not necessarily lower quality if being able to fix bugs in a library
yourself is a key quality requirement. Rather than having to pay
Microsloth for the privilege of phoning in a bug report which will
go into an invisible black hole and may or may not ever be fixed.
Besides, I think we need to look at the big picture here.
Free Software developers are creating a global commons, which is not
significantly decreasing but rather globally increasing, continuously.
In size and in features.
Despite complicating factors with some projects like...
- Losing in one aspect (e.g. performance) which is traded off
against another (e.g. functionality).
- Obsolescence due to using languages/tools/libraries which fewer
and fewer people use
- Obsolescence due to unmaintainability
...I believe that on the _whole_, the useful commons of free software,
and the quality of that commons, is increasing. Certainly looking at
Java-based free software, that is unquestionably the case over the last
few years. And I would suspect that with more and more people coming
on-line and learning to code, and learning to code reasonably well, even,
that growth rate is probably increasing all the time as well.
I'd like to propose an extension of Linus' law, to crystallise what's
been mooted on this list already:
With enough eyes, all niches will be filled.
Even if that involves "reinventing the wheel" several times for each
technology.
One man's reinventing the wheel is another
man's "listen to the customer and give him _exactly_ what he needs,
even if it is subtly different to the norm".
--
Robin
"Innocence is no defense." - Federal District Judge William H. Yohn
(People v. Mumia Abu-Jamal)
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