Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 21:50 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by ingwa
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

It has been said that, if making something for you costs 1, making it good for others costs 10, and then making it good for anyone costs 100. We have plenty of examples of the two extremes.

Maybe the amount of work you mention is the very reason why some projects don't walk that extra Km. It's a very uphill one.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 7:36 UTC (Wed) by ingwa (guest, #71149) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, except I heard the factor 3 instead of 10.

I'm pretty sure that this is the reason. But some projects actually do, even if there are no company behind it, even if it's rare. Krita[1], to take an example in my neigborhood, is handled very professionally. But you need to involve other skills than just software development, and that's also not something that many free software projects do.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 8:11 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> But you need to involve other skills than just software development, and that's also not something that many free software projects do.

Perhaps a strong focus on making it easy for others to contribute would help too. But that is also boring once your software does what you want it to.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 22, 2011 0:30 UTC (Sun) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

According to the "Mythical Man Month" it's 3x to make it usable by others, and/or 3x to be a reusable component in a system (more or less), or 9x for both:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#Proje...

This is covered in the first 5 pages of the book, which can usually be read online from Amazon. And it jives very well with every software project I've been involved in over ~20 years.

Anyone who does software as a profession needs to have read this book. And if your manager has not - find a new manager.