The Industry choice

[Bulba!]

On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 15:08:01 -0500, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com>
wrote:
>> There is the stability issue you mention... but also probably the fear
>> issue.  If you choose a solution from a major company -- then it fails for
>> some reason or they drop the product -- it's their fault -- you've got an
>> automatic fall guy.  On the other hand, an open source solution or 
>> otherwise less accepted solution ... it will probably be consider 
>> your fault by the organization.  It's a rational decision to avoid 
>> personal risk when you don't get much reward for choosing something 
>> different.

>You are ignoring the fact that with the open source solution you do at 
>least have the option of hiring bright programmers to support the 
>framework which has now become moribund, 

Theoretically. Because even though the source code is available
and free (like in beer as well as in speech) the work of 
programmers isn't cheap. 

This "free software" (not so much OSS) notion "but you can
hire programmers to fix it" doesn't really happen in practice,
at least not frequently: because this company/guy remains
ALONE with this technology, the costs are unacceptable. 

It's a case of "marginal cost" (cost of making yet another copy) 
becoming equals to the costs of a project: that is extraordinarily
expensive software. If this software gets sold or copied by
the millions, the marginal costs is going down to zero, like
it is the case with Linux. 

Imagine NOT being a technology company (say, Sun or
IBM or Borland) and trying to hire programmers to fix
you the kernel of this operating system. 

>whereas when a company goes 
>bust there's no guarantee the software IP will ever be extricated from 
>the resulting mess.

There is a good _chance_ here: money. Somebody has poured a lot
of money into this thing. It's not going to get dropped bc of that.

>So I'm not sure I'd agree with "rational" there, though "comprehensible" 
>might be harder to argue with.

It depends on definition of "rational", on definition of your or
company's goals and on the definitions of  the situations that 
are the context. 


>Avoidance of blame is way too large a motivator in large organizations, 
>and it leads to many forms of sub-optimal decision making.

This might be of interest to some people:

http://www.pkarchive.org/new/DefectiveInvestors.html



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It's a man's life in a Python Programming Association.