Quotes of the week
What incentive will there be for anybody to pen the next “Happy
Birthday” knowing that less than a century after their deaths —
their estates and the large multinational companies that buy their
estates — might not be able to reap the financial rewards from
their hard work and creativity?
— Benjamin
Mako Hill, on the recent settlement agreement poised to declare the
song "Happy Birthday" in the public domain.
I see a recurring pattern here: developers create something that they think is going to simplify distributing things by quite a bit, because what other people have been doing is way too complicated[tm].
— Christian,
commenting on Martín Ferrari's "rage post" about the Node.js approach to packaging.
In the initial iteration it usually turns out to have three significant problems:
- a nightmare from a security perspective
- there's no concern for stability, because the people working on it are devs and not people who have certain reliability requirements
- bundling other software is often considered a good idea, because it makes life so much easier[tm]
Given a couple of years they start to catch up where the rest of the world (e.g. GNU/Linux distributions) is - at least to some extent. And then their solution is actually of a similar complexity compared to what is in use by other people, because they slowly realize that what they're trying to do is actually not that simple and that other people who have done things before were not stupid and the complexity is actually necessary...