Subclassed

30 November 2008

A Big F*** You to Paul Graham, From Worldwide Software-Support People

Paul Graham: "They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, just to be able to deliver more software to users. And you know what? It would have been perfectly safe to let them."

I'm sorry Paul, as a representative of tech-support people worldwide, I have to say: f*** you.

Developers, even fantastically smart ones, don't test enough as it is. If you let them have "push-button release" privileges, the software industry would have an even worse reputation for terrible reliability than it already has, and companies would have to spend millions more in order to support all that crappy code that couldn't wait for two more weeks of testing and certification.

The world would be a better place if developers had to wait two weeks more than they do now, or even two months; maybe there would be less s**t around for others to pick up afterwards.

Labels: development, GeekDiary, paulgraham, rants

posted by GiacomoL @ 11:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

02 June 2008

OSS development makes "surprising" users more difficult

Scenario: you have two competing products. One is fully developed "in the open" (online Trac, open mailing lists, etc); the other is 100% closed (main bugtracker/dev lists are "behind the firewall", no public nightly builds, etc). What does it happen when you introduce a new feature?

In the closed case, nobody will know. You can plan a big Steve-Jobs-like demo, or disseminate distracting rumours (and send competitors up the hills); as long as you can avoid leaks, you are in control.

With an "open" project, in a few minutes the word will be out. You can hide things in a wiki or a bugtracker, but version control checkins will "fess up" pretty fast (you could deliberately put in blank or disguised comments, but that would irremediably pollute your repository). Competitors will start efforts to match the feature, and your competitive advantage might be gone even before you had time to exploit it.

The element of surprise, with an open project, is not available. This might or might not be a big deal.

Personally, I'm finding it a bit of a nuisance, since I have a couple of new features in the pipeline for my little apps which, I hope, will be seen as fairly innovative for this sort of tools.

Labels: development, GeekDiary, OpenSource, philosophy