[lug] can't make this stuff up, folks...

[Landon Cox]

On Oct 19, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Nate Duehr wrote:
> But... this would seem to indicate (on a very grand scale) that each
> piece of software NEEDS to be custom code to be "svelt", and if that's
> the case, there's a lot of business people out there sorely
> underestimating the labor and testing costs of "software".

Yes, I think it comes down to the fact that there's no free lunch in  
software development.  Even OSS isn't the silver bullet as much as I'm  
a complete evangelist for OSS.

If there was one universal OSS license that was compatible with every  
business need (both of the owner and consumer of the library), then it  
simply be a technical decision, but I don't think that will ever happen.

It mostly comes back to the conclusions of Fred Brooks' classic - even  
after all these years of technical progress, there's still no silver  
bullet.

Part of our job as engineers is to educate the business side and even  
become the business side to make these decisions more realistic.  If  
we're managing engineers, we need to make certain libraries don't get  
pulled in willy-nilly and we incur unexpected obligations.   As  
managers, we need to educate the business side into the tradeoffs,  
even risks.

So, I think I totally agree with you, there is no 100% solution,  
technically, legally, or business-wise, and there is no clean answer  
and we'll continue to have to make careful decisions about all this.   
But it starts with being aware of the issues which is why I wrote my  
little diatribe.

Thanks again for reading,

Landon