Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

[Vinzent Hoefler <ada.rocks@jlfencey.com>]

Preben Randhol wrote:

>Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
>> Preben Randhol wrote:
>> 
>>>I think that the era of producing crappy software and charge money for
>>>it without giving any support nor assurance is fading.
>> 
>> I would hope that. But seen realistically, I really doubt that will
>> ever be the case.
>
>I mean support will be a more important source of revenue than the
>software itself.

In manager speech: The software has to have bugs to support then. ;)

And managers BTW are a strange sort of human beings. They rather spend
a lot of money on crappy commercial systems, just *because* they cost
money.

>But of course it depends on the product, market etc...

Yes, definitely. Some kind of of software will always need support.
But I doubt that this is a very large quantity of existing software.
I mean a lot of people get around with some man pages. You don't pay
ACT for support, do you? ;)

But let's talk about embedded systems, there the user usually never
really comes in contact with the software until it fails (like our
coffee machines here... "Out of Order" *reboot*, ... "R 6", "M D B",
"Serial COMM failed" *reboot* ... whatever this means, it looks
interesting at last). So what would you like to support there? If it
doesn't work, it's just plain simply broken. That's not support,
that's guarantee and it will *cost* you money to fix it.

(And sometimes this can become quite a lot of money you will lose...,
the previous bug[0] allowed us to get coffee for free. Did I already
mention that I am sometimes a very big bastard?). So if they would
have invested a little bit more money (or preferably: time) into their
software development..., but they didn't do it. Why? Time to market?

>I see much of the open-source software like a magician who reveals old
>tricks in order to force the magicians to invent new better tricks.

And what have we gained from that so far? You still don't trust a x.0
version, do you?

>On the other hand producing crappy Open-Source software without support
>is still possible :-)

Whenever something is possible, it will be done. ;->


Vinzent.

[0] I would bet a 100 bucks it's written in C. ;)