Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3A53CB9E.EA7CF86C@uol.com.br>,
  Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote:

> The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far
> fetching

Don't make the assumption that a game would be simpler than an OS, just
because its more fun or something. Today's popular games are *huge*
undertakings. There are some game projects out there that have slipped
schedules enough to make the DoD blanch.

Making something that someone would want to play these days also
involves a large amount of art work. Computer artists are not the type
of people who would care one way or the other about something like a
programming language. They'd have to be either paid, or somehow conviced
to do a lot of work for free for other reasons (portfolio-building would
probably be your best bet).

To give you a better idea of the relative size, the last 2 computer
games I bought came on 3 and 4 CD's respectively.

Not that this isn't a subject near and dear to my heart. I started
programming 20 years ago by fixing the bugs in my BASIC games. (Anyone
else here remember those books of type-in BASIC games?).

> (let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small
> community of Ada programmers would be faster?). Other things we could

If you read their version of things at GNU.org, the main holdups were
not technical, but rather licensing for the third-party microkernel they
wanted to use.

You can check this all out yourself at
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-history.html .

> and if they catch the user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two
> which I recall were office related includind a general ledger program.
> I wonder if a Free version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth
> investing than a competing OS.

Well, the most important thing I think is that projects get *done*. To
that end, folks should probably work on what they want to work on. If
you want to work on an ERP pacakge, please do!

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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