3 ms·

I'm a reader and care, so at least one.

by yummybear 7y ago

usr1106 7y ago
Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.
- derefr 7y ago
  No, that allows you to know how programmers of FOSS got it wrong. Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.
  - usr1106 7y ago
    Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble. Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
    - derefr 7y ago
      > Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? How could I have that, or the opposite of that, without access to closed-source code-bases? That was my whole point: that you can't know what sort of selection bias you're implicitly accepting by only looking at a certain easily-accessible slice of the data. In order to know that it's safe to assume that FOSS is representative of all software, you first have to get access to enough non-FOSS codebases to be representative.

3 ms·

I'm a reader and care, so at least one.

by yummybear 7y ago

I'm a reader and care, so at least one.

usr1106 7y ago
Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.
- derefr 7y ago
  No, that allows you to know how programmers of FOSS got it wrong. Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.
  - usr1106 7y ago
    Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble. Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
    - derefr 7y ago
      > Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? How could I have that, or the opposite of that, without access to closed-source code-bases? That was my whole point: that you can't know what sort of selection bias you're implicitly accepting by only looking at a certain easily-accessible slice of the data. In order to know that it's safe to assume that FOSS is representative of all software, you first have to get access to enough non-FOSS codebases to be representative.