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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
"What happens if you subtract away all the closed source in the world?" You mean "published" closed source or private? I think COBOL is still the biggest language in the world in terms of lines of code in existence that are currently in use. How much of that is "published"? Practically none of it. The so-called "commercial software" is probably less than 10 percent of all the software in use today. Maybe more like 1 percent. I'll wager that PacBell has more lines of code in service to run its business than Microsoft has written in its entire history. Thats one company in one industry. I'm guessing we leave this out though since its mostly unpublished. Of course not all source code needs to be published. Only those programs that are offered for sale under copyright. As is mentioned before, Hemingway, Stephen King, even Danielle Steele don't have the benefit of closed source. But they publish all in plain text and still manage to make money. Why, pray tell, is software supposed to be different? Developers get the same protections under law that every other creative author gets and still they're not happy with it. Why are they special? I'm going to step onto a soapbox for a second here. The state of the practice in software development technology has been in a state of deevolution since 1980 or so. Not only has progress stopped, it has been rolled backwards and its largely due to closed source. I'm now watching with an extremly jaded eye a replay of the 90's. CORBA has been relabeled web services and its proponents are about to rediscover from scratch the value of naming services, transactions, and all the rest of the distributed infrastructure - only now in bloated XML formats rather than the compact binary message formats used before. Progress? Where? Its all a big circle jerk and I'm on my second loop (having joined around 1989 or so) because nothing endures and we have a whole new generation of prognosticators who are completely ignorant of what was learned on computers science in the last decade driving the so-called "new" standards. Jane stop this crazy thing. Where is the body of knowledge in our field upon which we are supposed to build our future? Gone. Up in smoke. Poof. The entire body of lessons learned in the last decade are locked away in the backup tape vaults of companies that have either been crushed by our favorite monopolist or simply changed tactics and discoutinued the "out of fashion" line. Bottom line. So-called intellectual property rights are destroying America's competitive edge and ability to innovate (note lack of trademark and capitalization). If we can't stand on the shoulders of the giants of the past, then we'll never rise above their heads. We're being robbed. I'll step off my soapbox now. Thanks for listening.
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