::scr open sores

[Chris Devers]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Andy Wardley wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 08:53:01AM -0600, Chris Devers wrote:
>
> Old Skool is dead.  Long live New Skool!

False dilemma. The cool thing about open source development is that you
get hordes of people working on whatever they think is cool & fun. The
problem with open source development is that you get hordes of people
working on whatever they think is cool & fun, and some things don't seem
to be cool or fun to *anybody*. Theme managers fun, usability bad! Mp3
players good, bug hunting boring! 

The truth is, the two modes complement each other well, and neither side
by itself offers everything that is needed in large scale development. 
Some itches will just get Scratched, but others need a ptraditional
aycheck to go along with that intellectual gratification.
 
> That's where the smart guys realise that the best systems are not pre-planned
> but grown.  Design happens at every stage of construction, not just the 
> beginning.

Not necessarily. For example, the Apollo engineers didn't just "throw
something together" and hope that we'd end up on the moon, and the
engineers that built skyscrapers like WTC didn't just have at it & let the
details sort themselves out. Or to take an example today, the new iMac
wasn't just cobbled together, but was well thought out in advance:

<http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=114276>

Now the Mac OS -- or any OS for that matter -- can provide a good
framework for more organic kinds of development, just as having a nice big
building allowed all sorts of commerce to take place, and putting
astronauts on the moon would give scientists a good framework for new
types of experiments. But there had to be structure in order to allow the
organic development to flourish. 

Worse needs better, and better needs worse. 



-- 
Chris Devers

"People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, 
make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"