Newsgroups: comp.object
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!ox.com!ox.com!emv
From: emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti)
Subject: Re: How to pay for reusable software
In-Reply-To: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM's message of 10 Apr 91 01:42:52 GMT
Message-ID: <EMV.91Apr10010155@poe.aa.ox.com>
Followup-To: comp.object
Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator)
Organization: OTA Limited Partnership, Ann Arbor MI.
References: <1991Apr3.231849.13410@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <jls.671247772@rutabaga>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1991 05:02:03 GMT

In article <jls.671247772@rutabaga> jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

   >The problem that I see is that there will be many areas where
   >it would be valuable for us to develop standard libraries of
   >software components, but there will be no economic incentives
   >to do so.  

   It's largely the same infrastructural defect that afflicts companies
   in other areas: short-term focus. Clearly it costs money up front to
   write reusable software, and yet, amortized over several projects,
   such an effort pays for itself. But if a company only thinks 3 months
   ahead, there is no basis for such multi-year payback.

I suspect there are good rational reasons why companies don't invest
in the extra time and effort to make their code reusable.  Consider an
interface to a proprietary system (e.g. a stock ticker) which is a
relatively small part of a greater whole (e.g. a trading system).  

Since the upstream interfaces are all proprietary, there is no
guarantee that they won't change in a relatively short time; you would
not want to spend time writing code that was reusable but obsolete.
It may be difficult or even impossible to find potential buyers for
your code if you were to want to sell it; most development of this
sort is done in-house, because it's relatively cheap compared to the
rest of the entire system.  And you really don't want to sell or give
anything away to your competitors in this market, since it might
endanger your core profit centers.

So whereas it might be nice to have a set of standard libraries for
dealing with the output of the Telekurs Ticker Service Adapter, the
number of users is sufficiently small and they are ignorant of (or
hostile to) each other and chances are none of them are going to ever
know enough about each other to make any reuse or resale possible.

--Ed
emv@ox.com



