open source

There are 2 posts tagged open source (this is page 1 of 1).

the cost of developing software

I had the opportunity (or misfortune!) to visit an organisation recently whose computer systems are somewhat shambolic. They understand that their systems are not in a good shape, but as this is not their core business, spending money on it is really not what they want to be doing. In fact, it wasn’t a business at all, it was a charity.

This is a real dilemma for such an organisation. Vast sums of money tend to be hard to come by for most charities, and explaining to donators that you spent their cash on an IT system probably doesn’t look great either! But boy, do they need a new system.

The current system is essentially an old school Access database and nothing much else. This would not be a problem if it actually worked OK, but it doesn’t. The system was created around 10 years ago and no longer fits the “business” model. Sure, you eventually get what you need from it, but everything takes around 10 clicks, it doesn’t work with the latest MS Office, forms take 30s to 1 minute to load, the output frequently has to be adapted manually and frustration with the system is high.

Understandably, they are frightened of change though. Not change induced by moving away from their old system, but change as in how much change will they get from £10k to get a new system developed. Nothing I would suspect.

This is not good. But hey, we programmers need to eat, so we can’t expect to do stuff like this for nothing, right?. Maybe charities just need to get real with this situation. You either pay up and get the system you need, or you don’t have a system at all. Screw the inefficiencies created by the absence of such systems and also to the people who are affected. This is just the world that we live in. Eat or be eaten. I mean who wants to sit and develop software and not get paid for it?

Mmmmmm, well loads of people. We must be one of the only industries that give away our time for nothing, and for no reason other that we love doing it so much. So maybe instead of wasting our time developing another new open source web framework in whatever language, it might just be a great idea to develop the software for these charities. Sure, it ain’t going to be as exciting, but it may be much more rewarding.

Has this been done before? I dunno. I can’t find much after a quick search. However, if it has been attempted, I certainly don’t know about it and I suspect neither do lots of other developers. If someone has heard of something similar please leave a comment with the details.

The undertaking of such a task would by no means be plain sailing. It would require lots of input from the staff at charities and their volunteers – because as the software developers we ultimately need to know what to develop. This is achievable though, right? And in the era of open communication afforded to us by the internet, there may never have been a better time. If open source projects can work, then I see no reason why this idea should not be possible, it just needs momentum.

is open-source software worth it

I’ve been having some real problems with FireBug recently – essentially it has made itself utterly useless. Why? Well when I set a breakpoint within FireBug and that breakpoint is reached, the code window does not scroll to the breakpoint. I then have to drag the scroll bar down to the breakpoint, then when I press F10 to perform a step over, the code window resets itself to the top. As you can imagine this get rather annoying after a while, especially with large JavaScript files.

As a result of these misgivings I have found myself using the IE8 developer tools – which are actually quite good, though FireBug, when working, is better.

Luckily the project that I’m working on is not exactly critical, though the quicker I get finished it the better. However, if I was working on something that was going to generate me $$$$$$, I’d hope to god that I wouldn’t have to waste so much time with the debugger. With this in mind, and with the mindset of “You are a dumb ass if you fail to utilise open-source software” prevalent in our industry, it raises the question as to the limits of open-source software.

If the software that you are developing is largely based on open-source/free software, and this software sells for hundreds of thousands do you really want to be using libraries that have no real service-level agreement? For example, let’s assume that your software sells for $200,000. Then it’s safe to say that your customers will be expecting some pretty good service for that kind of money. Suppose a bug is found in some third-party open-source library that is used in your product. So you have two options: 1) you ask the community to fix the bug or 2) you fix the bug yourself. Are any of these really a satisfactory solution? I don’t think so.

Consider option 1. Suppose that the project stagnates or your bug is just not an issue for the community, then it may take some time to get this bug fixed (or they may not fix it at all). But you need this bug fixed yesterday! People tell you “Oh there is always someone in the community willing to help”. Nonsense. There are no guarantees and this is exactly what a professional organisation needs. A bank, telecom company, utilities company and so on are not going to give a shit that you can’t get it fixed soon, they will just move their business elsewhere. This is the reality of the situation, and if you are moving a core part of your business out to open-source software and charging a small fortune for your software, I’m pretty sure this is going to come back and bite you. Open-source software proponents can scream until they are blue in the face that this will not happen, but it might, and that’s all that matters.

So if option 1 cannot save you then your left with option 2. Well first, it’s easy to say that you just get the source and edit it yourself, but the fact of the matter is that it takes quite some time to be comfortable with a large code base. In particular, to be comfortable with the fact that making changes in one place doesn’t cause problems elsewhere. OK, unit tests help, but there are no guarantees. Maybe you could be involved in the maintanence of the open-source software on a regular basis to ensure that your team has built up a familiarity with the code. Maybe even developing new features etc. That sounds like a great idea. Until your competitor comes along and uses all these lovely features that you have so kindly developed for them! Then how much of a fool do you look.

The fact of the matter is that if you write the code, then you have more control over it, and this eliminates any dependencies you may have on outside parties. The more you charge for your software, the tighter your service level agreements are, and the more third-party libraries define the uniqueness of your product, the more important this becomes.

This is not to say that we should all go out and write our own compilers, IDEs, and various other things. It’s just a matter about being sensible about what you use.