guod.net

I think I just spent about 2-3 extra weeks working on a project just because we didn't have the source code available. A problem that would have been immediately obvious to someone reading the source required us to do extensive testing and reverse engineering. I'm not a crazy communist-corporation-hating smelly long-haired open-source activist, but my recent trials with a certain Microsoft library were enough to make me consider going that route. I'm not naive enough to think that the whole world will one day be open-source. In fact, I don't even care if it is or not. I just want people to understand the cost of closed-source. In today's software industry, the amount code re-use and componentization just keeps growing. As software becomes more complex, vendors must depend on other vendors to provide the bits and pieces that are used to build a complete software solution. This is a Good Thing. The Bad Thing is that we are living under this lame assumption that hiding source code is preventing businesses from losing money. Please, add up the hours and days I spent reverse-engineering this fix, and put it on an accounting sheet under the heading "Price of Using Closed-Source Library" or "Time Spent Speculating About What's in the Black Box We Paid For." Then we can see if closed-source is really protecting business interests. It's kind of like that theory that I first read about in Natural Capitalism where, if you make businesses count the cost of their environmental misbehavior, then they might consider stopping it. But only until they see the cost.