On 7/17/06, Dean Michael Berris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Write the whole thing under an open source license? How much will that cost? Where will you find developers that will do this for free?
I dont know. Maybe someone has written it. If you cant write it yourself you pay someone who can. But then put it under an open source license. If im the one paying and im the government its just as well. other government branches can use it and that good for everybody. government pay only once. and nobody can change the price on me later or manage to shoot themselves in the foot and disappear with me left holding the bag with a dead end product. nobody is being asked to code for free. the more urgent the need the greater the willingness to pay. its just that the benefits are not limited to those who payed for it. you all think its all or nothing. nobody paid for software nobody get software. its not like that. a lot of people code for free for various reasons. come on people are not just about food shelter and clothing. people do get paid write software but everybody get to use the software. thats the rub for most people. its acceptable for some not to others. on the average though it benefits everybody.
My idea of Software Engineering is making software that _works_. If it solves your problems today, then you might have done enough for the meantime -- but if the code you wrote is not easily extensible, nor easily maintainable, nor is hard to use and released under an open source license, how is that better than acquiring/using proprietary source available software that _already meets your needs NOW_ ?
yes but i doubt if you are willing to add a fee features you were not able to guess beforehand or integrate with our c3system. we have experienced that several times already. maybe i need an smtp server with a cute extension taken from x.400 where the whole header is authenticated with a hash and with reliable timed delivery and alternate recipients. i can deploy it in 2 weeks. now thats good clean extensible software. sure somebody has equivalent proprietary software but how much is it? and is there a guarantee they will not go away? of course there is a lot of hardcoded variables in there but then i can leave it runnning unattended for several years. i have done that with my present job and i have to log in every now and just so i dont forget my passwords. somebody got an imps server? we have been looking for that for a long time, the last contact we tried from finland did not call us back. just this morning we decided to to write one ourselves. deployment in 3 weeks. i dont think we can acheive that with a supplier from finland. come on nobody has a monopoly on good clean code. the advantage with this case is that i can post it on the net and have everybody look at it. and tell me what could be wrong. in my first job i wrote some closed source code and its so bad im glad the project died. i remember one part of that had a backdoor we forgot the tell our manager about. i also remember being asked to rewrite visual basic code that one of our partners bought from another company that went bust. its was so bad there were more commented out code than actual running code. i gave up after three days. most people believe that writing things from scratch is bad. thats because they code up to a spec. not to whats needed. they prefer long development cycles. this leads to creation of code thats not needed. nobody wants dead unclean or unextensible code. if you allow it to accumulate by avoiding to rewrite you get unextensible code. if you like to code in the big and optimize too early you get unclean code. not to mention hard to debug code. and thats the killer. many people think this is where the development process must spend the most. well my professor told me that. oh well... -- things i hate about my linux pc: 1. it takes more than a second to boot up 2. keeps asking about filenames and directories 3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday 4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made 5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
