Re: Response a negative view about Delphi

PL <pl@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message <486501dd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
John Jacobson wrote:
you look into the way these are being developed, you will see that they were
lucky enough to benefit from a few energetic individuals, even the ones that
list hundreds of "contributors" are usually just the favorite child of one
or two super-programmers that have an interest in them for whatever reason.

That's the idea of open source development. Some people do a lot of
work, some make only small contributions in order to solve specific
problems that bother them. I don't see where is the problem with this model.

Nobody does the part that nobody likes, like writing help and manuals, doing
usability testing, use cases for non-technical users, etc. AND when the one or
two busy-bodies get interested in something else, the project dies right then
and there. Seriously flawed model.

Very doubtful. Compiler experts almost never contribute their time and
effort to free open source software.

Facts are actually different - GCC, FreePascal and many many others.
Many of them also happen to be among the best in their respective classes.

GCC maybe. There don't seem to be "many many others".

I'd rather see all the examples of companies that thought they were going to
make a profit on open source software but instead are actually having
financial difficulties. There seem to be a lot more of those.

Just to remind you again that financial difficulties is the current path
of Delphi.

No, it was the recent path of Delphi, the buyout solved that particular
problem, though I'm waiting to see what happens with the rest of Delphi'as
market problems.


Except almost all of their revenue and any long-term competitive advantage
they might have.

Why?

Because giving away your best seller is 100% guaranteed to destroy most of your
revenue. That's the simple truth of the matter that Open Source religionists
seem to ignore.


They will give knowledge and freedom to developers (which costs next to
nothing to provide), and in return they get free work from developers.

It is not free work.

It certainly is free work.

I find a bug, I fix it, I submit a patch so that I don't have to
re-apply the fix in the future. I solved *my* problem, and Delphi got a
free bug fix.

Nonsense. What really happens here is more like this:
1) programmer doing this project in his spare time finds what he thinks is a
bug, according to his individual needs for the project.2) programmer thinks he
fixes bug 3) programmer submits his "fix"
4) others find that other things are now broken, according to their individual
needs for the project.

Why does it happen like this? Because open source projects don't have the
resources to research the actual abilities of their participants, nor do the
participants have the incentive to test the parts of the project that don't
interest them, so you end up with what in economic terms is extremely
expensive. People who are naive about economics, and confuse it with
accounting, might think the project is getting "free" work from the
participants, simply because no cash or checks change hands. But the reality is
that the economic costs (time, effort, the value of the next best alternative
uses of that time and effort) are incredibly high.


Reintegrating, monitoring, organizing, allocating,
testing and designing code takes a lot of resources

That's true even in a closed development environment, and the same
problems apply when hiring new developers. Assuming hiring more
developers to work on Delphi is good, why not hire them at near-zero cost?

First, it is not true that more is necessarily better. I'd rather have a
handful of highly-skilled senior software engineers working a project full-time
than a hundred middle-of-the-road programmers just out of school. Second, as I
have mentioned before, they are not zero-cost, or even near-zero-cost.


even if the developers (stupidly) work for free.

I think this is the root of your resentment of open source software. You
just don't understand why should anyone work for "free".

I can't find any better way to explain why O/S developers don't really
work for free, and actually only serve their own interests.

Oh, I'm sure there are all sorts of psychological reasons why programmers might
work for "free". They might get an ego boost from their role on the project,
they might want to do at least some coding outside of the 9-5 rat race, they
might firmly believe that the "Bazaar" is a better place to be than the
"Cathedral", or they might have philosophical reasons for working in a type of
non-financial environment. But no matter what their individual reason for it
is, they are undercutting the software development profession by working for
free.


On the other hand there IS interest in a community supported Pascal
platform - the existence of FreePascal and Lazarus is proof. Not just
interest but some serious talent as well.

Actually they are proof that OSS doesn't work.

Disregarding facts, of course.

No, all you have to do is look at the length of time it has taken them to get
to a product that is even close to what is available commercially.


The problem seems to be in the low level of understanding of economics
implicit in your arguments.

I think that actually you fail to get the low level of economics. Let
developers help you at no cost, rather than hire them for high cost.
Can't get simpler than that.

That's not low cost in economic terms, that is low cost in accounting terms.
You keep confusing the two.


It is not free work, and anyone who has ever
looked at the economics of software development will easily see that. The
main impediment to most software projects is not the fact that the software
developers get paid to work on it, nor that the code is confidential, it is
that it is very difficult to manage software developers and software
development. The main costs of developing software are not the developers'
salaries, it is the problems inherent in communicating clearly between team
members, getting the design right, testing, debugging and QAing, and the

Suppose you're right (not entirely but never mind).

There are open source projects by orders of magnitude bigger than
Delphi, and they already solved all those problems. You might dislike
Linux (we'll get to that in a minute), but the fact is that it's a huge
projects that runs pretty much smooth.

It is a dictatorship, so it appears to run very smooth for those that don't
have different needs than the dictator. It doesn't work t all for others. Danny
Thorpe was a good example of someone for whom it did not run at all when he was
tasked with Kylix. The Linux project also doesn't run at all for most PC users.

It is the difficulty of doing proper design that seems to plague most OSS.
Look at Linux as a perfect example. That OS is not nearly as well designed
as Windows XP--it is a piece of crap that most PC users will never even try
to use. The only OSS that seems well-designed is Firefox.

Once again, the problem with facts. Ask O/S designers which is better
designed, WXP or Linux, and you'll be surprised.

Why would I ask O/S designers how well an operating system is designed? Only
the end users count when it comes to judging design. And Linux failed that test
miserably so far.


Linux is a better server O/S, as it was designed after Unix, which was a
server O/S. Throughout the years Linux become more and more general
purpose, and today it's easier to adapt Linux to anything from a biggest
super-computers, to the smallest system-on-a-chip. If that's not good
design then probably there isn't such thing as good design.

It is not good design overall, it is just good design for a very limited, very
specific purpose. Linux is very poorly designed for what most PC users need
from an operating system. That's why nobody but Linux insiders were surprised
when all the hoopla about Linux giving Windows a run for it's money on the
desktop died with Linux suffering ignominious defeat several year ago.


Non of the Windows family of OSes comes even close to that.

Actually, plenty of large computers and plenty of compact systems run a Windows
operating system. To say that none of the Windows operating systems come close
to Linux in usability on servers is just plain silly.


But even if one were to dismiss all this, there remain significant technical
barriers to a successful open-sourcing of Delphi. The IDE code is written in
several different languages that are not available in free IDE's. Several
sections of the code are copyrighted and/or are the proprietary code of
third-parties. There are several patents associated with the code. Etc.

That's probably the first fact based argument.
True, there may be problems to solve. But maybe they can be solved and
the cost isn't high.

That would be a first.

--
***Free Your Mind***

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