[9fans] software quality and popularity

[Richard Uhtenwoldt <ru@river.org>]

geoff.9fans@collyer.net writes:

>Popularity and quality are not related.  (A more pessimistic view is
>that they are related, but inversely.  The current state of operating
>systems, languages and software generally tends to support that view.)

William K. Josephson writes:

>In fact, in my experience, the Plan 9
>source code is far *more* portable to other environments than most
>Unix source is between Unix variants, for instance.

well, you see, if all code written for Plan 9 can be easily ported to
Unix, but the code written for Unix is difficult to port to Plan 9
(because Unix is not as well thought out and well factored as Plan 9),
then people who want to use apps without having to port/rewrite/write
them will choose  Unix, because the apps available for Unix will
tend to be a superset of the apps available for Plan 9.

so here we have a process whereby bad engineering actually 
increases a platform's popularity.  (Dijkstra noted a similar process
back in the 1970s in which DP department workers increased their job
security by choosing overly complex solutions, which IBM was happy to
sell to them.)

and even people like me, who appreciate well-engineered, well-factored
software, choose to use one of the popular, poorly-engineered
platforms, because the socioeconomic utility of a platform is
essentially proportional to the number of users of the platform.
(reasons for this omitted for space reasons.)  so, I put up with the
cost in my wasted time of the poor engineering to get the
socioeconomic benefits of the popularity.

eventually a critical mass of (millions of) users will come to
recognize the true costs of poorly-engineered software, resulting in
popular software as well-engineered as Plan 9, but that is not going
to happen this decade.

what is going happen this decade to help along the eventual popularity
of well-engineered software more than anything else is the replacement
of data formats, communications protocols, APIs with secrets and
"owners" (firms with the ability to prevent their competitors from
making full use of the data format, etc) with data formats, protocols
and APIs without secrets and owners.

so, even tho the open-source platforms like Linux are poorly
engineered, the more popular they get, the better for unpopular
platforms, and thus well-engineered platforms in the long term,
because Linux's data formats, protocols and APIs have no secrets and
no "owners" so that the unpopular platforms can hook into them more
effectively.  one example of this hooking in is the consulting of
Linux device-driver source code by Plan 9 developers.

this hooking in gives the users of the unpopular platform a bigger
fraction of the socioeconomic benefits of Linux than they could get
from the unpopular platform's trying to hook into proprietary
platforms, because the "owners" of the proprietary platforms will tend
to prevent competition from other platforms by denying those benefits.