[Discuss] CrowdStrike Fiasco (eBPF)

[daniel at syntheticblue.com (Daniel M Gessel)]

I don't think embarrassment over poor quality metrics, like a high open 
bug count, are what keeps software in-house. Preserving the competitive 
advantage granted by a multi-million dollar investment was the main concern.

Or not wanting to get bogged down providing support: creating good 
documentation is as hard as coding; "pull requests" need to be reviewed 
by senior developers.

And everybody's got their opinion about naming conventions, indentation 
and where curly braces should go... A "conversation" that goes viral 
could be a massive time sink. And execs don't really want developers to 
"interface with the public".


My problem with proprietary software is it is so often "consumer" 
oriented - the big "computer" operating systems have been narrowing 
focus to non-technical users, "managed desktops" making writing code 
more difficult. I do use consumer devices to watch TV or make phone 
calls (with the power of supercomputers from my early days) and that's 
fine, but it's just not want I want from my "computer".


On 2024-07-30 16:59, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:04:31 -0700
> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>
>> But there is no reason proprietary software can't be good, just that
>> that one pressure for quality is reduced when sources are kept secret.
> I think this doesn't hold up to practical scrutiny. I have seen plenty
> of horrible, ugly open source programs: everything Lennart Poetering has
> written, for example. Or ShareLaTeX which was (might still be) so bad
> that it won't compile outside the developers' unreproducible build
> environment.
>
> In my experience, the license has nothing to do with quality. What
> matters is people and time: enough people with appropriate skills and
> sufficient time will produce something good. Cut any of these and the
> results will not be good. Cut all of them and the results will be
> worse. How many mission critical open source projects are supported by
> too few people in their spare time?
>
> The only bearing the license has on this is that volunteer programmers
> typically aren't forced by managers and publishers to do the impossible
> to meet arbitrary release schedules. Of course, abusive management
> practices are not required of proprietary software as Larian Studios
> demonstrated with Baldur's Gate 3. So... yeah. License is not a measure
> of software quality.
>