Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

TBH

Most open source stuff actually is poorly engineered, if engineered at all, because a lot of it is developed by beginner-level coders. Now, I do of course know that many, many commercial products are full of crap, too ... but engineering excellence still mostly goes into commercial products. Obviously. It goes where the money is, and in most product categories that can't/won't be open source.

Almost every open source project is completely focused on implementation, all the while implementation is only one facet of a software project. All other facets are usually neglected.

Yes, there are quite some projects one might call "industrial-strength XY" -- but the vast majority aren't and never will be. This is also not just a numbers game; a large number of crap-quality open source stuff is incorporated into widely deployed stacks. Just take libraries for file formats, just a couple days ago we got a dozen or so CVEs in libtiff ranging anywhere from denial of service to arbitrary code execution. That thing will be on most web servers.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: