Posts by dakliegg 9 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2018
I kept having a fault in network switches only to find someone diagnosing a failed UPS by changing its settings, repeatedly throwing it into self test and watching it not recover. Sure, it's a great mystery why the ups is broken but bypass it before causing hundreds of users to freak out over their PCs.
MS maintains their own global root CA. It's not a hard thing to automate securely either. Just someones backlog story and tech debt comming back to haunt them. I often think the world should just go the let's encrypt route so they are forced to implement automation.
If face masks could only be made of gold and platinum few people would give them away even when it was in their best self interest.
Skilled software engineers are also very rare and are more valuable than platinum and gold. If you had to "consume" an engineer to make a piece of software there wouldn't be much software and they would be the most expensive things in the world. However, their work product can be duplicated at very low cost, so the things a software engineer produces can be widely shared generating an enormous amount of value. Software I wrote three decades ago is still generating value for people.
But that doesn't change the rarity of the original resource and that effects the number of software engineers available to maintain software. No matter what, software packages will get abandoned. It doesn't matter what the licensing model is.
Another nasty effect of software is its use doesn't satiate the demand for it, instead it creates demand for even more software. The effect it has in multiplying productivity just creates more demand for the stuff. I suspect that even if every human on the planet could code, the demand curve would grow even faster.
We just have to get used to software getting abandoned.
El Reg does a pretty good job describing the problem of open source. I remember when open source was a new movement and people like Stallman were idealistic middle age guys. It all sounded pretty good to me, but one of the upsides espoused by Stallman was that proprietary software gets canceled and lost. Open source would enable the project to carry on.
That wasn't something that made sense to me. I could, for example, see Stallman's C code and know without a doubt I wouldn't carry it on. If I'm going to work for free on something, it better be fun and not an example of a rat nest.
And the problem gets worse than that. It is very difficult to hire engineers to work on any software, so is a company going to spend that rare resource on open source? Maybe if the open source is your product and the openess is a marketing tactic. But things that are difficult to monetize like open SSL or BouncyCastle?
When I was a technical evangelist at Microsoft I would hold events for developers of plug-ins and libraries. I noticed that all of them were very underpaid and it visibly showed in their clothing and gear. Even the most successful tools struggled to break a few million in revenue. Often at the same time I'd have some other event for business or consumer software companies and they were all well paid or even personal millionaires with nice clothes and epic laptops.
Tool and library development is a labor of love. No one gets rich from it, except when they abandon the project and use it as a portfolio piece to get a high wage position.
Companies develop very unique ways to do their accounting so one barrier is companies have to change their accounting practices to fit into the editorial provided by the software company. Software companies in this space develop elaborate customization features based on what they see in their markets.
Because SAP and the US LOBs developed in differing markets they will have different editorials on accounting baked into their software. The number of customers where the fit is great out of the box will be a subset.
Over the long term SAPs implementations will evolve to be more customizable to reach the same customers. No one in this world is positioned to steal their lunch and this suite with criss LOB integrations will quietly run everywhere, in every major company and every government on the planet. Just give it a couple decades.
I multitarget everyday using flutter. I'm a lone dev that doesn't even know iOS that well yet I can deploy to an old 5s from my hackintosh VM just fine.
This is really a company fearing learning a new language (Dart) more than anything. Dart is so banal any dev can learn it.
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