The Making And Maintenance Of Open Source Software (book) by Eghbal

book tier2 software

goodreads, wiki, amazon

openarchive, gutenberg

authors:

• Nadia Eghbal
  

pdf links:

Baris' notes

Part 2, how people maintain

• the work required by software
  

  • code as artifact, code as organism
    

  • observation 1
    

    • “most computer programmers begin their careers doing software maintenance, and many never do anything but” -Nathan Ensmenger
      

    • large open-source projects tend to become modular as they grow, because of cost of maintenance coupled with lack of motivation to maintain
      

  • observation 2
    

    • software never dies after finding its set of users
      

      • because someone will continue using it no matter how much time passed
        

      • COBOL is still out there. Banks don't want to change it due to technical risks
        

      • lots of issues with having to maintain out-of-date software
        

      • Javascript
        

        • ECMAscript
          

        • browser compatibility headaches, frequent breakages
          

      • Neal Stephenson:
        

        • “(Unix is) not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic . . . Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it”
          

        • Code is not a product to be bought so much as a living form of knowledge
          

    • reminds me Marc Andreessen's remark about software's economic moat. It starts developing, and with each bug fix it becomes more stable and collects a wisdom. It has wonderful economic properties that can be copied infinitely with zero cost. Hence software eating the world.
      

  • open-source is "free as in speech, not free as in beer" –Richard Stallmann
    

  • open-source is "free as in puppy" –Jacob Thornton of Bootstrap
    

• The hidden cost of software
  

  • 3 types of cost
    

    • creation
      

    • distribution
      

    • maintenance
      

  • My idea: Current LLM coding helps with creation and maintenance cost somehow. But as developer might not understand creation part too well, it makes maintenance harder too. Complicated relationship.
    

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