Terry Reedy wrote:
"Steve Holden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Well, since everything you say is true, I suppose there's not much wriggle room for me.
Well clearly there's a spectrum. However, I have previously written that the number of open source projects that appear to get stuck somewhere between release 0.1 and release 0.9 is amazingly large, and does imply some dissipation of effort.
And how do the failure and effort dissipation rates of open source code compare to those of closed source code? Of course, we have only anecdotal evidence that the latter is also 'amazingly large'. And, to be fair, the latter should include the one-programmer proprietary projects that correspond to the one-programmer open projects.
Also, what is 'amazing' to one depends on one's expectations ;-). It is known, for instance, that some large fraction of visible retail business fail within a year. And that natural selection is based on that fact that failure is normal.
But when a shop goes belly up, it's most often replaced by another business in fairy short order, and proprietary project failures are usually hushed up by firing the programmers and promoting the managers.
Whereas the bleached bones of the failed open source projects are visible for all to see on the SourceForge beach.
regards Steve -- Steve Holden http://www.holdenweb.com/ Python Web Programming http://pydish.holdenweb.com/ Holden Web LLC +1 703 861 4237 +1 800 494 3119 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
