Re: [tlug] GPL vs. paid version and ethics

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Mon, 6 Aug 2012 23:05:44 +0200
Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

> 2012/8/6 Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>:
> 
> > On Mon, 6 Aug 2012 13:07:02 +0200
> > Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> >
> >> My goodness, the places you've seen sound like terrible places to
> >> work.
> >
> > Yes. Of the software companies i've seen here in Switzerland, all
> > but one work the way i discribed.
> 
> Google has lots of engineers in Zurich, and I can *guarantee* that is
> not the way they work. Is that the one you meant?

No, it was called Olsen and Associates and was a small finance R&D
company. It went bankrupt 3 months after i left (no, it wasn't me! ;-)
 
And yes, i know Google works differently. Most of my CS friends from
university work there, these days (at least those who have not quit
working with computers alltogether). But then i have heard enough
about Google that not everything in their development process is
how it should be. Much less the climate there.

> I'm not sure what your point is; the fact that you haven't personally
> seen something simply means you haven't seen it. I've worked in four
> countries as a software engineer, and been in agile teams in great
> work environments in all of them. How prevalent such professional
> teams are is speculation on my part, I'll admit.

My point is, that comercial software development as i know it sucks.
And mind you, i've been in 5 companies already. Some of them with
formal procedures, but hardly anything that i'd call even remotely
sufficient to produce good code. At best, i've seen mediocre code
from the better coders. Bad coders went usually unchecked as long
as the stuff they wrote somehow worked.

Eg: In the last company i worked for, i got a ring buffer code, written
from scratch in C from a collegue who has been writing C for 15 years.
I've found more bugs than lines in the code with even a short glance at
it, so i decided to just delete it and write a ring buffer myself.
It was only half as long and worked well. 
But the application crashed. Why? Because other parts of the application
were depending on the bugs in the ring buffer to work correctly (like
losing bytes once in a while). 
Now consider that i started at said company right after i graduated.
Can you imagine how i felt? And yes, i left not soon after that incident,
though for other reasons.


> However, I think the doom and gloom portrait that you painted is not
> very accurate, and I think you greatly underestimate the quality of
> work that professional teams are capable of.

Well.. A professional is someone who does what he does for money.
It doesn't say anything about how good he does it. Yes, it is a doom
and gloom portrait. But that's what i've seen in the companies i worked
for. The code i get from other companies (customers, suppliers and such)
doesn't speak well of most of them either.
 
			Attila Kinali

-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin