[OT] Extra time spent

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jun 6 12:36:11 PDT 2014


On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 02:01:38PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 6/6/2014 1:06 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 05:14:34PM +0200, Timon Gehr via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >>
> >>Isn't the fundamental problem here that the customer will pay a
> >>billion dollars even if the software ends up being full of bugs?
> >
> >Yes, because the customer is a corporate entity, whose upper
> >management doesn't know (nor care) about the difference between good
> >software and working but very buggy software. They dictate the
> >financial decisions, and their IT department just has to live with
> >it. So it really goes both ways. Company A's upper management decides
> >to acquire software X from company B, and company B's upper
> >management decides on an unrealistic schedule, and both A's and B's
> >tech staff have to suffer the consequences. A's tech staff can't
> >produce good software in that unrealistic timeframe, and B's tech
> >staff have to deal with all the bugs that end up in X.
> >
> 
> Bottom line is, managers are purely liabilities, not assets.
> 
> It's no surprise to me that the best software out there is usually
> OSS, where there isn't one damn manager anywhere to be found. Funny
> how people think managers perform an actual function, and yet we get
> by fine - BETTER - without their existence.

To be fair, there *are* some good managers out there who will actually
bother to understand the limits of technology and turn down unreasonable
customer requests. Get rid of them, and you may end up with the opposite
problem:

Techie A: Hey dude, this morning I got this crazy kewl idea on how to
	make our spreadsheet app play a flight simulator!
Techie B: Really?! Let's see it!
Techie A: Here, you put this formula in this cell here, and it exploits
	the automatic solver system to generate flight coordinates! And
	it uses the built-in graphing function to do 3D rendering!
Techie B: But it doesn't let me shoot missiles at buildings.
Techie A: True. But if we replace this function here with this other
	equivalent that does almost the same thing, but does this other
	thing when called with these unreasonable parameters, then we
	can simulate exploding buildings!
(2 months later...)
Techie A: Dude, how come our product isn't selling, while Dumbass
	Corporation's clearly-inferior product is so popular??!
Techie B: I dunno, maybe we need to market our product?
Techie A: But I already talked to 50 customers, but all the deals fell
	through 'cos they keep insisting on unreasonable deadlines!
Techie B: Yeah, why are customers so dumb?! They don't deserve our
	product! Oh BTW, did you pay the rent yet?
Techie A: What rent?! I thought you paid for it! I'm broke, man!
Techie B: So am I! Looks like we're gonna hafta close shop...
Techie A: But what about the flight simulator...?!

;-)

I do agree, though, that *in general*, it seems OSS churns out far
superior products than proprietary companies. The most provoking
sticking point is interoperability, which basically gets thrown out of
the window on day 1 because business types have this irrational fear
that allowing interoperability will allow competitors to beat them. So
either the software is crippled and can't work with anybody else
(fortunately, the internet has made this approach untenable), or the
data format is kept under NDAs and threats of lawsuits should anybody
have the audacity to try to interoperate with it, a veritable walled
garden where only corporations with deep pockets can afford to pay for
access to API docs.  Whatever the scenario may be, the invariable
outcome is that end consumers suffer. They have to put up with software
A's output files refusing to work with software B, or when edited under
software C all the formatting gets screwed up, etc..

And this is just on the point of interoperability... there's also
transparency, which is completely absent in most (all?) proprietary
houses that I know of. Marketing types seem to have this irrational fear
that publishing a list of known bugs will give a negative image of the
company, and so no bug databases are ever open to the public. When you
submit a bug report, even *you* can't look at its progress afterwards.
And who knows how many security holes are lurking there that nobody
knows about (except the kind of people that you *don't* want to know
about these things -- you *know* they're gonna find it one day; security
via obscurity doesn't work)?

Sure OSS may lack the glitz and eye-candy, but I'd rather have software
that functions *well*, than software that has all the glitz but it's
full of bugs and poor performance underneath.


T

-- 
English is useful because it is a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps
well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call
reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess, though in the
nicests of all possible ways. -- Larry Wall


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