Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 17th Oct 2005 20:27 UTC
"No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so."
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RE: Your Customers Don't Care How You Code
by drfelip on Tue 18th Oct 2005 13:08
in reply to "Your Customers Don't Care How You Code"
Member since:2005-07-06
I think one big advantage of FOSS is just the contrary: very often you can e-mail the authors and tell them "THAT doesn't work for me". They could fix it or not, but communication IS possible. It's more and more difficult as the project is bigger: projects like KDE, Gnome, big commertial distributions like Fedora, SUSE... are less likely to listen to you. So... Think about software giants like Microsoft.
I'm not very sure sales are a good way of knowing if something works well or how to improve it. Sadly, too often marketing is more powerful that quality. Not always the best product is the more successful.
Equally for FOSS and commertial software, communication is ALWAYS important
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Successful software is not the result of following good engineering practices. Successful software results from paying attention to what people want, not what you think they need. Good coding and ddesign practices help you, but your customers have no reason to care. They judge you by your deliverable, and they don't care how you got there.
Commercial software has the advantage of the obvious feedback loop provided by sales. Not enough sales? Poof, you're gone. No one will care if you wrote good code or bad code. Commercial vendors don't have the luxury of blaming their unpopular products on their customers.
FOSS coders, of course, have no real feedback loop with their customers, and can continue blithely working on software that the world ignores.