I don't think embarrassment over poor quality metrics, like a high open
bug count, are what keeps software in-house. Preserving the competitive
advantage granted by a multi-million dollar investment was the main concern.
Or not wanting to get bogged down providing support: creating good
documentation is as hard as coding; "pull requests" need to be reviewed
by senior developers.
And everybody's got their opinion about naming conventions, indentation
and where curly braces should go... A "conversation" that goes viral
could be a massive time sink. And execs don't really want developers to
"interface with the public".
My problem with proprietary software is it is so often "consumer"
oriented - the big "computer" operating systems have been narrowing
focus to non-technical users, "managed desktops" making writing code
more difficult. I do use consumer devices to watch TV or make phone
calls (with the power of supercomputers from my early days) and that's
fine, but it's just not want I want from my "computer".
On 2024-07-30 16:59, Rich Pieri wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:04:31 -0700
Kent Borg <kentb...@borg.org> wrote:
But there is no reason proprietary software can't be good, just that
that one pressure for quality is reduced when sources are kept secret.
I think this doesn't hold up to practical scrutiny. I have seen plenty
of horrible, ugly open source programs: everything Lennart Poetering has
written, for example. Or ShareLaTeX which was (might still be) so bad
that it won't compile outside the developers' unreproducible build
environment.
In my experience, the license has nothing to do with quality. What
matters is people and time: enough people with appropriate skills and
sufficient time will produce something good. Cut any of these and the
results will not be good. Cut all of them and the results will be
worse. How many mission critical open source projects are supported by
too few people in their spare time?
The only bearing the license has on this is that volunteer programmers
typically aren't forced by managers and publishers to do the impossible
to meet arbitrary release schedules. Of course, abusive management
practices are not required of proprietary software as Larian Studios
demonstrated with Baldur's Gate 3. So... yeah. License is not a measure
of software quality.
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@driftwood.blu.org
https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
