Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Gentlemen Programmers

I have not been a fan of Open Source. It smacks of Gentlemen Programmers, creating great software for free. I don't buy that.

On the other hand, commercial competition - writing software for money - has gotten us where we are today: tons of stupefyingly redundant software, as the same functions are built by different concerns, requiring other software to emulate their actions so everything seems to be a single interface. Every office needs its own Directory and data repository.

Blumen's Law states: We Only Need One of Everything.

But to get to this stage, we have to solve the problem of funding. Amazingly, Google has solved the problem of funding: everything is free because it pays for itself. Google promises to build the 'net by popular debate and referendum, and pay for everything out of its ample coffers.

2 comments:

Larry Blumen said...

If I have any close readers at all, they may pick up the fact that I am acquainted with the art of programming. I'm not proud of it, it's just true - I have been, and still am, a grunt programmer. I consider it a high calling. Sergey and Larry are programmers to the 32nd degree and beyond. I'm a little lower down on the pole.

Larry Blumen said...

While I'm on the subject, let me say that one of my big peeves in other people's software is the display "1 Comments".

"0 Comments" is fine and "10,000 Comments" is perfect, but "1 Comments" is just plain stupid.

It takes one additional "If" statement in your code to qualify a count properly. Not doing it right implies an indifference to the language we speak.

Sergey and Larry should be ashamed.