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Message-ID: <3F606E6D.2090809@outerthought.org>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 14:45:33 +0200
From: Steven Noels <stevenn@outerthought.org>
Organization: Outerthought
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To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: [OT] when is software finished [was: Re: on better release and
 version
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Reinhard Poetz wrote:

> From: Bruno Dumon [mailto:bruno@outerthought.org] 
> 
>  <snip/>
> 
>>I expect Woody to also take another year or so before it can 
>>be considered stable (in terms of interfaces, not code).
> 
> 
> ... that long? I expected it to be stable sooner (end of this year).
> What's open? (I already added this discussion point to
> http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Edit.jsp?page=GT2003Hackathon)

On a lighter note: we have a running joke over here about "when is 
software considered 'finished'".

It can be because the community around it dies, or because the author 
considers it to be perfect, and not requiring any fixes, refactorings or 
feature additions anymore.

The funny thing is that an author sometimes declares its child finished 
because the community has died.

OTOH, 'ls', 'tar' or 'deltree' could well be considered finished 
software without any negative connotations.

Oh well, this is all geek humor (which is another running joke around 
here [1]), which we all be glad to share with all of you on the 7th of 
October (hint hint ;-))

[1] Geek humor being the kind of humor that erupts from male IT 
professionals if they've spent too much time behind their terminals, 
thinking what they have been doing will effectively change the 
rotational direction of our green globe. Geek humor can have two side 
effects: 1) you make a joke of yourself, being aware of the fact that 
many other things in life can have much more effect on that rotation 
than the lines of code and email you have been creating during the day, 
or 2) others make fun of you since you, taking yourself to serious, 
passionately start to explain how much fun it would be to change the 
earth's rotation, "just because you can". Continuously swapping both 
perspectives while working in an open source community caters for longer 
periods between burn-outs. :-D

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML            An Orixo Member
Read my weblog at            http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/
stevenn at outerthought.org                stevenn at apache.org