in reply to Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done

30 year recreation timeframe? Sorry, but open-source gives you a way better chance at that than closed-source. There is no way your company could afford to pay Microsoft to dredge up the Win95 code in 2025. Or IBM for OS/2 or AIX or OS/400 or... Or Sun for Solaris/SunOS. Or HP for HP-UX. Or ... Open source? You absolutely must take the snapshot of the code you're using, and if it doesn't work with your RedHat Linux version 34, you at least have a reasonably-priced chance at getting it to work - hire a contractor at $100-200K/year (in today's dollars), and s/he should have it working in 1-6 months.

Oh, but the data format has changed 15 times since you took that backup? With open-source, you have the original code, and the current code, and that contractor has a reasonable chance of being able to map constructs from one to the other, and building a migration tool.

That said, 30 years seems like an awfully long time. I'm not sure whether your management has decided on this time frame because it sounds good, or because there's some actual practical or legal reason to do so. Even most financial audits don't go back more than 7 years... and 30 years from now, no one will even know what to look for that we may be doing today. All the documentation will be long lost, buried somewhere in backups that no one knows how to find anyway. Heck, I have a hard time figuring out what happened 10 years ago in my project (I joined this company/project 8 years ago), and it's still all online.

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Re^2: Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done
by samizdat (Vicar) on Sep 15, 2005 at 15:53 UTC
    Absolutely right, Tanktalus. And that's not even considering that nobody'd have a Centronics parallel port on their P999. We have one whole guy who spends his time managing all the old CAD system setups so that they either have their original OS or that they work on a newer variant.

    In our case, these are mandates from On Very High, i.e., DoD/Congress etc. I'm not saying that these are a good thing, or that they should be applied everywhere; it's just what I have to operate with.

    This survival-think is pushing us to open source in many ways, although there's a counterforce from Congress that is pressing us to put government purchase dollars into the private sector. More and more of our project and line managers are willing to look at the long term costs of closed source seats and hardware versus commodities and programmer time. I am a perfect example of the result of that new assessment; my whole tasking is using open source to solve problems without $$$.
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      This survival-think is pushing us to open source in many ways, although there's a counterforce from Congress that is pressing us to put government purchase dollars into the private sector.

      Please note that "open source" and "the private sector" are not mutually exclusive. In the context of the greater thread, you might be using these terms for convenience, to represent ideas you have already been talking about. But I think we should be careful to point out that the ideas you are talking about do not necessarily generalize; open source licensing and private sector dollars are perfectly willing to commingle, and are doing so in fact more and more.

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        Very true, revdiablo. In fact, in my other (private-sector) incarnations, I utilize open-source exclusively. Likewise, Sandia people contribute back to outside open source projects, as they come more and more to realize (as Apple did) that there's a tremendous upside to leveraging worldwide open source developments that far outweighs the small downside of not keeping product-development payware companies afloat.

        Sandia's in a fairly unique position because of its responsibility as a keeper of Very Important Technologies for the American people. In some ways that drives us towards control of the source code; in some ways it prevents us from using some of the benefits of worldwide development and resources. I personally am not a Sandia employee; a private company controls my contract but my Sandia tasking is totally open-source-focused.

        In fact, I just used the power of open source development to squeeze a payware company into giving me their source code. {Yes, we're paying for it.} They realized that it might be the last $$$ they ever get from us because we're happily obsoleting them with our own internal developments and open source libraries found on the Net {through Perl Monks, no less!}, but they started by only offering a usage-limited compiled binary on a single node-locked workstation for not a lot less money than we ended up with.

        IMHO, any software company that doesn't think through their software strategy WRT open source and make some strategic decisions is going to become road kill in the very near future. ESR and others have catalogued Microsoft's panicked reactions, but that applies across the board to both companies and guys who expect to make bread as employees writing software.
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