Open Source

Saturday, August 03, 2002

For Geeks Mainly: Thanks Eric!  Thank You Very Much for Analyzing the Software Development Issues Precisely and Well Wow.  Talk about the luck of the browse, I just happened on Eric Raymond's blog only to find this:  http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_07_28_armedndangerous_archive.html#79585067  which he wrote as a response to this: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart1.shtml Eric's piece nicely addresses the issues with closed source development.  Here are two excerpts: My assertion is that software development has reached a scale at which (a) even large corporations can often no longer afford to field enough developers to be effective at today's project scales, and (b) traditional methods of software quality assurance (ranging from formal methods to internal walkthroughs) are no longer effective. The only development organizations that seem to thrive on today's complexity regime are open-source teams. Note that I am not claiming that open source is a silver bullet for the software-complexity problem. There are no silver bullets, no permanent solutions. What I am claiming is that at the leading edge of large-scale software, closed-source development doesn't work any more. The future belongs to open source plus whatever other practices and technologies we learn to use with it to develop at ever-higher scales of complexity. This is very similar to the points I made (although Eric does a better job of making them; thank you!).  I'd also recommend that you read the piece of U.S.S. Clueless because he does a damn good job as well. Note: Eric Raymond, a long time member of the Open Source and Unix community is NOT a zealot as noted here. 4:37:04 AM