• @superkret@feddit.org
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    954 months ago

    Read “The Mythical Man-Month”.

    Basically, a team of 5-8 motivated developers can create high quality, medium complexity software extremely fast.
    But if the project is just a little too complex for one team of devs and you need more people, then you’ll need a lot more people. And a lot more time.

    Cause the more people you add to the project, the more overhead you have. Suddenly you need to pull devs off coding to bring new hires up to speed. You need to write documentation on coding style guidelines, hold meetings, maintain your infrastructure, negotiate with hardware suppliers, have someone fix the server room’s door locks, schedule job interviews, etc. etc.

    • @emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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      74 months ago

      Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’

      Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

  • @starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    724 months ago

    I love this meme because every app on my phone designed by a company worth more than a million dollars fucking sucks, and the best app on my phone is RIF, an app designed by a single developer, and reanimated into a lich by a team of programmers for free

  • @HStone32@lemmy.world
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    454 months ago

    "Dear floss4life,

    Our developers have encountered an issue while using the open source framework you published on github. We have lost as many as 400 user accounts. The estimated cost of this error is $6800.

    This is unacceptable. Be a professional and fix it immediately.

    Chad Elkowitz, MBA, Gruvbert and sons Finance Lt"

      • @acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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        44 months ago

        And it’s also why many companies refuse to use open software. It baffles me that no insurance company saw this as a market opportunity to sell open source software insurance.

  • @flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    384 months ago

    I’ve actually found a lot of the smaller foss tools I use are better than their proprietary counterparts because of the design philosophy and that people don’t cut as many corners on passion projects as when they’re on a deadline

  • sunnie
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    4 months ago

    the issue with this argument is that i don’t care about who made the app when it doesn’t work. that’s why i still have a chromium based secondary browser, it doesn’t matter that it’s the work of a billion dollar company trying to get a monopoly when the website i’m on is broken. yes, the blame is on who made the website, not firefox. i still need to be able to use it somehow

  • @emmie@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    80/20

    I live by this rule, it made me gain so much credibility and money from people who don’t know any better. 80/20 <3

    20 percent of work nets you 80 percent of result (except no one knows what I did isn’t 100 percent) bam 4/5 of time saved. Everyone is happy and if something doesn’t work we can just blame it on client

    • I follow the 80/20 rule recursively. as soon as I’ve gotten 80% of the way there for 20% effort I immediately stop, and start a brand new project for the remaining 20%. Bam! 96% complete for only 24% effort.

      taps forehead

  • @NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    114 months ago

    “All-star” makes me worried there’s some hidden society of super competent developers remaining at the big software corps that we somehow never noticed.

  • Jake Farm
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    114 months ago

    Are most open-source software developed by hobbyists?

    • @eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      194 months ago

      yes and they either become popular because of their usefulness and get organized like firefox/mozilla or they get co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified like chrome/chromium

      • @entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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        154 months ago

        Firefox/Mozilla as an example is a bit of a stretch, given the fact that Mozilla Browser/Firefox is originally based on the open-sourced version of Netscape Navigator

      • Katlah
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        144 months ago

        firefox is squarely in the “co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified”

        • @eldavi@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          very true and as has happened to almost all projects once they get a critical mass of users and presence in the ecosystem.

    • Alex
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      84 months ago

      There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

      The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.

      • Jake Farm
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        34 months ago

        That seems like a better system than say, Godot, who picks and chooses who is allowed to contribute.

    • @RandomVideos@programming.dev
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      44 months ago

      100% of the open-source software i contributed to was developed by hobbyists so, using that information, you can infer from only that information that only hobbyists can develop open-source software