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> What this means in practice is that companies that use open source extensively in their operation, become slower and slower to innovate as they are carrying t
by vorador 12y ago
> What this means in practice is that companies that use open source extensively in their operation, become slower and slower to innovate as they are carrying the weight of a thousand different systems of checks on code quality and robustness, which people using closed source will start delivering faster and faster as they effectively partition the review/quality question to the person selling them the software and they focus on their product innovation.
To contrast with what you said, I've worked at Microsoft, which is almost the company that invented NIH and we had the same problem. I think it's because, to paraphrase Alan Perlis, programming nowadays is less about building pyramids than fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThat is an excellent point. That we're building primarily distributed software rather than point software has two effects, one that the number of failure modes are quite high, and two that the 2nd and 3rd order interactions are not easily deduced by inspection. I like the organisms picture. I think of them as 'atoms' in a molecule but organisms is much better, it includes their own idiosyncratic behavior into the mix.