3 ms·

Welcome to IT as a career. Having started in the 90s, I have been through these same conversations regarding Adobe, Oracle (oh lawd Oracle) MS, Dell, Apple to

Welcome to IT as a career. Having started in the 90s, I have been through these same conversations regarding Adobe, Oracle (oh lawd Oracle) MS, Dell, Apple to a lesser extent. “Vendor the industry currently relies on heavily is changing things or yanking the rug again?” The free market works by big players yanking every one else around. Guh.

derefr 9y ago
The big players aren't yanking anyone around. They take responsibility by announcing things like alpha periods, beta periods, release candidates, Long Term Stability branches, etc. And enterprise developers take advantage of these, ensuring that they only code production applications against stable/LTS libraries and APIs. It's SMB/"indie" developers who should be taking the responsibility here, I think, for relying on these officially-unstable packages in their own production systems, and especially for encouraging others to rely on such. Yes, sometimes, it's the only way to be competitive/have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition. But that doesn't mean that it isn't their responsibility to cope with these changes. They're taking on that risk-of-change by using those unstable libraries or APIs. Heck, this is half of the point of software Venture Capital: being able to underwrite the risk of relying on an unstable platform/ecosystem, so that you can have enough runway to recover and still finish your product if "the ground moves under you", and therefore can "safely" rely on these unstable technologies. (And one not-oft-talked-about property of bootstrapped startups is that they have to underwrite that risk themselves. If a bootstrapped startup isn't just gambling with its founders' money, it has to behave more like an enterprise development shop, building on only stable foundations.) Theoretically, you could move this underwriting role into the companies themselves, such that the companies themselves would monetarily cushion the blow of changes in their unstable APIs. But they'd need a pretty big interest in the involved consumers to do so. In such a world, you likely wouldn't have separate startup businesses using the BigCorps' unstable APIs; rather, you'd have a set of BigCorp incubators with large shares in most new startups. Maybe that hypothetical world would have higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product than our own! But I bet there'd be fewer startups, because starting a startup would be a lot more like a regular BigCorp job.
- ko82jeipp 9y ago
  See the post I replied to where the comment was about a big player flailing with dep mgmt to the frustration of those who are having to change course whenever they wave away the previous solution The evidence is right in your face, but you’d rather explain how “if we all saw it from my perspective...!” Oh they announce change and deprecation, most times, but ultimately the decision was made in seclusion and foisted upon the public at large Feels a bit like a time and revenue taxation scheme without representation. Just thinking aloud Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt
- geodel 9y ago
  My experience IBM products like websphere tell different story. The were slow and buggy and never slow and solid.
staunch 9y ago
There's no comparing proprietary products with open source projects. The Go project is a beautiful body of work and there's no call for comparing it to proprietary crapware.

derefr 9y ago

The big players aren't yanking anyone around. They take responsibility by announcing things like alpha periods, beta periods, release candidates, Long Term Stability branches, etc. And enterprise developers take advantage of these, ensuring that they only code production applications against stable/LTS libraries and APIs. It's SMB/"indie" developers who should be taking the responsibility here, I think, for relying on these officially-unstable packages in their own production systems, and especially for encouraging others to rely on such. Yes, sometimes, it's the only way to be competitive/have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition. But that doesn't mean that it isn't their responsibility to cope with these changes. They're taking on that risk-of-change by using those unstable libraries or APIs. Heck, this is half of the point of software Venture Capital: being able to underwrite the risk of relying on an unstable platform/ecosystem, so that you can have enough runway to recover and still finish your product if "the ground moves under you", and therefore can "safely" rely on these unstable technologies. (And one not-oft-talked-about property of bootstrapped startups is that they have to underwrite that risk themselves. If a bootstrapped startup isn't just gambling with its founders' money, it has to behave more like an enterprise development shop, building on only stable foundations.) Theoretically, you could move this underwriting role into the companies themselves, such that the companies themselves would monetarily cushion the blow of changes in their unstable APIs. But they'd need a pretty big interest in the involved consumers to do so. In such a world, you likely wouldn't have separate startup businesses using the BigCorps' unstable APIs; rather, you'd have a set of BigCorp incubators with large shares in most new startups. Maybe that hypothetical world would have higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product than our own! But I bet there'd be fewer startups, because starting a startup would be a lot more like a regular BigCorp job.

ko82jeipp 9y ago
See the post I replied to where the comment was about a big player flailing with dep mgmt to the frustration of those who are having to change course whenever they wave away the previous solution The evidence is right in your face, but you’d rather explain how “if we all saw it from my perspective...!” Oh they announce change and deprecation, most times, but ultimately the decision was made in seclusion and foisted upon the public at large Feels a bit like a time and revenue taxation scheme without representation. Just thinking aloud Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt
geodel 9y ago
My experience IBM products like websphere tell different story. The were slow and buggy and never slow and solid.

staunch 9y ago

There's no comparing proprietary products with open source projects. The Go project is a beautiful body of work and there's no call for comparing it to proprietary crapware.