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Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:
- Everything is unbearably slow
- Everything is too large
- Bitrot
- Half-baked products get shipped
- The same old problems recur again and again
- Most code has grown too complex to refactor
- Business is uninterested in improvement
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On Disenchantment with the Current State of Software Development
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Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:13AM (1 child)
You forgot that FOSS has gone into "greedy shortsighted" mode with companies taking over.
They are not interested in "done" software, but recurrent income. Thus the "we can't fix that, let's restart" trend. Which of course leads to restarts of huge, complex, messes, which warranty they will never end, and that will require support contracts until end of times. "Let's rewrite the basic libs, the core of the OS, the display systems, the toolkits, the desktops, everything... just make sure when we approach completness of something, we jump ship to the next very new best, and go back to v0.1"
Trully depressing, because they do it from the inside, not from a fork that has to earn foothold by showing clear adventages over the original. And in doing that, they drown the good things by sheer inbalance of size and resources.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:43AM
Free Software and Open Source Software are _completely_ different things.
Whenever I point this out I'm met by confident jackasses who point out that they both have the same licenses. That does _not_ make Free Software the same as Open Source Software.
The difference between the two is not the choice of licenses, but the _reason_ the license was chosen. I mentioned that to Richard, to which he replied "That is correct".
Richard himself quite a while back told a journalist that the purpose of Free Software is "to build a community" whereas the purpose of Open Source is "efficiency".
I expect that this distinction is quite likely while he doesn't particularly care whether Hurd will ever be finished: it has a community. It's the community that's important, and _not_ the code.
I looked into this after I myself confused Free and Open Source at Kuro5hin. Someone pointed out that "Open Source is the enemy". After carefully studying both Free and Open, I came squarely down on the side of Free Software.
I cooperate with some Open Source projects, I'm not an asshole about it - but software that's purely my own, is Free Software and not Open Source.
Some cluebot had the gall to tell Linux that the Linux Kernel is Free Software because it has the GPL. Linus tore him a new asshole.
When this discussion came up at Advogato, someone explained that "They're fellow travelers".
That's a Communist term for two people who have the same destination but who are enemies of each other: Russia and China repeatedly exchanged fire in Mongolia, and China invaded North Vietnam in 1975. (The NV tore China a new asshole of its own.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]