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On Friday 24 September 2004 10:29 pm, Adrian Midgley wrote:
On Thursday 23 September 2004 20:53, Neil Williams wrote:This is why there is Open Source code in Microsoft Windows that has been modified but the source code is not available - nor is there any need for Microsoft to do so.But by doing that, MS cut themselves off from any easy use of _improvements_ by anyone else who is publishing and contributing back work to the main fork.
That may be important if the code in question was alpha or beta. Once mature and stable, future developments are more about keeping in step with external pressures (which are public) and maintaining integration with other systems. The closed source systems only need to maintain integration with their own code so are free to ignore public standards that apply to the main fork. Typically, the interface modifications to link with the closed source are EXACTLY the kind of code that the open source developer is looking to add to the codebase. Instead of being required to help, the proprietary developers force the reinvention of the wheel. Most of my work is on library code. I write the engine, the logic and the framework. Someone else writes the user interface. The library continues to work with future developments - maybe with a few minor extensions - the major changes between platforms are all in the interfaces with other parts of the system, including the user. These libraries are easily transferred between platforms - that's the whole point of a library, to be utterly generic yet robust. The libraries are usually comprehensively documented too, the developer knows that others want to use the code in ways that may not have been anticipated - to reduce the number of inane queries, as much detail as possible is made available to everyone.
Which to be sure is less sub-optimal engineering than various of their behaviours, but still increases their costs for no added benefit.
Not true for mature library code. They would have had to write a smaller version of the library for themselves anyway - it's far easier to strip out the extra code to support other platforms than to create it!
In doing so, therefore, unless they can show a clear $ benefit to their strategy as distinct from the alternative of improving, and publishing improvements for reincorporation to teh main line,
They don't need to care about the main fork. Their interface is usually incompatible with the main fork (if it isn't, they will change it so that it becomes incompatible, e.g. filesystems and Samba). If the code is already mature, improvements are usually external to the library itself. Using multi-platform, generic library code has immense value for proprietary developers - they know that the code has been specifically designed to be as neutral as possible. It means that the library will continue to function even when they transfer it to different flavours of their proprietary distributions. To invert the usual medical analogy: would you use a branded medicine that only worked in a sub-set? or would you prefer a generic that worked in all situations? Writing code for one target platform builds an inherent bias into the program that can be impossible to remove later, via a network of assumptions. Writing code for an unknown or variable platform builds an inherently flexible and robust codebase that cannot be achieved in other ways.
the officers of that corporation demonstrably fail in their duties to their shareholders - which are substantially the only peculiar duties they have that have any teeth.
True, but not effectual in this scenario. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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