Snellman: On open sourcing existing code

Posted Mar 21, 2015 18:33 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Snellman: On open sourcing existing code by ledow
Parent article: Snellman: On open sourcing existing code

We code like junk when nobody is looking.

No, I don't think it's as simple as that. I work on both free and proprietary software and it really is a different environment. I'm very proud of our actual proprietary software and I would have no issues whatsoever with anyone seeing the source. In fact, we ship the source, which is buildable on pretty much any UNIX-like platform.

However, because we have a pretty constrained build and test environment, I'm not quite so proud of our build infrastructure and test scripts. To generalize those and clean them up would be an awful lot of work and we simply can't justify the effort.

Usually in a proprietary development project, you have the luxury of these sorts of constrained environments, so your infrastructure code isn't as clean and portable as it could be. It's far easier to accumulate technical debt in such an environment than in an open-source environment, and business concerns rather than aesthetics dictate if and when the technical debt is repaid.