Subject: Re: source access vs dynamism From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/08/27 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3144703658674455@naggum.no> * Paul Wallich | If a hundred people want source enough to ask you, and it takes you five | minutes to make a decision, that's a day's work. If 25,000 people want | source enough to ask you, that's an entire working year. and here I thought we were programmers, but instead you argue that people should do all kinds of things _manually_? something wrong, here. | Obviously you may be able to reject a lot more of the 25,000 out of hand, | but at some point even reading the email will clobber you. For any | project (like an operating system) that has a potentially enormous base | of interested programmers, personal communication with everyone who wants | to look at the source code and has a superficially good reason to do so | is going to clobber the person who acts as a choke point. if that person can be trusted to manage something as complex as an operating system, I sure hope he's smart enough to realize what a silly problem this is before it hits him. otherwise, who knows what kinds of silly things the operating system will do. there's a reason companies hire more people when the work-load increases: most people who want something done and want to make money doing it have figured out that it is beneficial if they can actually train other people to do certain tasks and not have to do everything themselves. given the wondrous society in which we live, several people come pre-trained or, lo and behold, from other, similar, jobs with a directly useful skill set. here's a fairly simple idea: write a program. publish it. earn money doing this. support your customers. include automatic means to get upgrades and patches. include _some_ source, the stuff you'd like people to use for innocuous customization and generally to understand your program better. also include a description of what it takes to get more or all source, such as printing a file, adorning it with a signature, and sending it by ground-to-ground mail. then do the natural thing in our advanced economic society: charge applicants whatever it costs to process their application so you have money to employ people doing just that. or write a web thingamajig that deals with the boring administrative stuff. it's like the _rage_ among managers and marketing people these days, so it's a little odd that programmers don't think about it, isn't it? ;) I think more programmers should have business training or at least some _exposure_ to what it takes to start and run a business. it seems it might surprise a great many people, but you don't _have_ to work alone and do everything yourself. basements and garages do _not_ beat a corner office and an efficient secretary. you actually do get a lot more done if you hire people who are smarter than yourself at whatever they are doing than you would be yourself. rewarding competence is the best way to ensure that the team's competence increases, but it's sadly out of vogue in a world of programming where it matters more that people can be replaced than that they do outstanding work, because they will leave and need to be replaced, and the next guy won't be able to figure it out. if, out of 25,000 people who write you with a desire to learn more about your software, you don't get 250 "hi, I want to work for you" and manage to take proper care of those people, you're doing something _very_ wrong. however, I wouldn't hire people who only see problems and refuse to check whether the rest of the world perhaps would have to change somewhat if you changed one particular factor. hell, even the free software/open source change has a whole lot of ramifications, not all of them equally apparent, but I guess I'm used to thinking in terms of cascading changes and see that there's no way we can avoid serious scaling problems if a lot of people get access to an insurmountable heap of inaccessible source as the answer to their _real_ need: software that should fade away into oblivion (i.e., not stand out and demand attention) and just do whatever it is intended to do, seemlessly and according to how people find most beneficial and productive on their own terms. this kind of software will not happen if a whole lot of people value access to source code above all and want their mark on software that stands out and demands attention like a laser beam right into your eye. we need to work on something much bigger than one person's individual egoboost. it's _incredibly_ hard to do that reliably without forming a loyalty that lasts beyond the feeling you get from seeing your name in a ChangeLog entry. and worse, you don't _want_ to work with people who aren't loyal to the goals you have set for your project. if you can't get rid of destructive people, you will have very little time available to keep going in the right direction. this is also something you learn PDQ if you try to run a business with employees. let me put it this way: I dread the situation where software is written by people who are satisfied with name recognition and status among their peers -- we'll just get MS-DOS all over again. granted that we live in a culture that adores youth and reveres immaturity as a deity, but if everyone who succeeds in any way loses their position to someone younger than they were when they were recognized, it isn't just a whole lot of disillusioned people we have to deal with: those who aren't wiz kids in time won't even have a brilliant flash of youth to look back at. I'll do a giant leap to something entirely different: I think a whole lot of the issues that plague the world today is based squarely in a rampant fear that the world will end _very_ close to 2000-01-01. Y2K is nothing more than fin-de-siècle all over again, as far as the societal response is concerned -- technically nothing important will go wrong. reverence for youth is a pretty good sign people don't think they'll get old. what better way to go than when listening to Abba revived by some jail bait? I think when the world wakes up with a huge hangover near 2000-01-05 and start to realize that the only thing that really ended was the _hope_ that the world would end and we wouldn't have to take care of things for the next 50 to 80 years of our lives, a whole lot of people will start to work and value things very differently from what they do now. when the world doesn't end and we aren't plunged back to the dark ages because the entire world electricity system didn't fail, after all, I predict that all the crap we're doing now with a three-month horizon at most will take on much longer horizons, again, like 50 years. there are some signs that some people think like this already: a publisher in Norway has decided to revamp their renouned 16-volume encyclopædia of world history and publish a special hand-made leather-bound edition in only 2000 copies to those who think it's important to maintain excellent craftmanship and some of the traditions of the millennium past. they used to say that nostalgia was better in the old days, but I think it'll get better and better in the coming years... but, anyway, let's get this millennium nonsense over with so we can get back on track. we have work to do, damnit. #:Erik -- save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers