
Software: More Battlestar, Less Gunsmoke - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/04/software-more-b.php
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PaulHoule
Unfortunately, open source tends to be better at Battlestar and less bad at
Gunsmoke.

Volunteers just aren't going to get excited about the task of updating a
knowledge base every year for the new tax code; it's generally more exciting
to do something that's new.

Now, you could say that Linux is more like Gunsmoke, in fact, it's more like
Gunsmoke than Windows or Mac OS X is -- and because an operating system is
something that you depend on day in and day out, an OS ~should~ be like
Gunsmoke. Linux, however, is an unusual case. Today Linux development is
dominated by a few big corporations that either sell Linux commercially (Red
Hat) or that decided that, by contributing to Linux, they could have a better
Unix than they could develop in house (IBM)

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pedrocr
Linux development doesn't actually seem to be "dominated by a few big
corporations". See:

<https://lwn.net/Articles/395961/>

"None" and "Unknown" are still very large and there's a very wide bunch of
companies that participate.

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gacba
The Gunsmoke trend will continue as long as customers keep changing their
minds about what the heck they think is important, or because the software
needs more power to satisfy how the users actually work with it.

That certainly drove the early releases of MS Word, Quicken, Photoshop and
others. Eventually, there's "enough" to work with (feature wise) and the
milking really begins because the need to upgrade is more perceived than
really needed...The last few releases of Word and Quicken certainly
demonstrate this well.

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rch
Eclipse platform is a good example of this problem. Ever since the resource
perspective stopped being the default, things have been headed down an
uncertain path.

Why can't there be a true core, that has some chance of being 'finished' at
some point?

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mburney
So should scientific and technological progress in general be like Battlestar?
I would much rather it not have a known ending. If I wanted that, I'd choose
religious dogma.

~~~
lutorm
I think the analog in science are people who just keep doing the same old
studies slightly better (ideally), publishing papers like "This year we've
managed to beat down the error on parameter X to 1/3 of what was previously
possible." even though it's not clear what the benefit of knowing X better is
apart from assuring a continuing train of grants supporting them.

