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In some way it is self inflicted damage. Remember Murphy was an engineer, and "if you let something go wrong, it will go wrong" means as an engineer it is your
by bumbada 6y ago
In some way it is self inflicted damage. Remember Murphy was an engineer, and "if you let something go wrong, it will go wrong" means as an engineer it is your responsibility not letting people shoot their feet, because if you do, they will(and blame you).
As an engineer if you leave a manhole cover open and people fall down, it is your responsibility. If you leave your code incomplete, people will discover your bugs.
When I was young I made that mistake: Leaving too much code to document and open that we had no time to make perfect(it was impossible,there was no physical time on our entire life for that).
Today we create a library, and a program with limited functionality but PERFECT and make people shooting on their feet impossible(limiting the functionality too). Very few things to document. It works as it should.
I learned that from Steve Jobs "saying no to things". Deciding who is your customer, deciding what is your problem is essential.
People don't want to do that. They don't want to select a customer and make a decision that could be wrong. So they leave it open.
- elnygren 6y ago> As an engineer if you leave a manhole cover open and people fall down, it is your responsibility. In an OSS project, you can just provide it as-is without any kind of warranty and clearly tell this in the license. Maybe you are confusing OSS with actual paid work and paid software (services)? Of course sometimes the business has OSS components that customers expect to have a certain quality but still... nobody is obliged to work for free, especially if the end user is a for-profit corporation.