Five Reasons Why Open Source Software Code Quality is Important

Enterprise Open Source Journal's Sept/Oct 2006 issue has an article on Spotting Low Quality Open Source Code. Their top ten list includes no-no's such as poor commenting, inconsistent naming conventions, bad code style (poor indentation), missing error checks etc. Now I've read a lot of source code and many of the guidelines listed in the article can be generalized to Spotting Low Quality Software Code - not just open source. But it is super critical for open source for a couple of reasons:

1) If software is truly 'open' to lots of developers, then the code must be maintainable by them. This is really feasible only if the code is readable, simple, adheres to standard conventions, etc.

2) Part of the lure of using open source in the enterprise is the option of an inhouse development team to read, understand and possibly modify or extend the open source code. Again, this is only feasible if the project's code is of good quality.

3) There are many many many open source projects out there and so it's critical for the project to achieve a critical mass of usage in production environments in order for it to survive. This implies that the project is needed and is useful by a large number of development teams and hopefully enterprises. General software systems typically need clean designs and high quality code so that they can be applied and extended for multiple needs.

4) Poor software code quality and buggy software usually go hand in hand. If the code is buggy, it will never sustain a critical mass of users.

5) What's harder; building an application that utilizes an open source system or upgrading the application with a new version of the open source system? Upgrades can be very complex especially if the new version of open source software is not backwards compatible with previous versions in significant ways, or, when upgrades also require upgrading many dependent systems. So with that in mind, if the software code quality of the open source system is poor, how clean or easy will it be to install upgrades?
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My Two Cents on $1.65B YouTube

Congrats to YouTube on their new riches, and congrats to Google on grabbing that prime time real estate. I am a huge fan of YouTube because almost all my searches, even for the most obscure videos, turn up results. The search for quality home grown videos is far more entertaining than the dribble programming on television. I expect that YouTube will find ways to protect and compensate owners of copywrited materials and I won't mind watching a 15 second video here and there to help pay for the content and functionality.

YouTube has succeeded where cable and satellite tv have failed to deliver. For how long have we been hearing about video on demand and the best they can offer is the ability to watch 100 different videos at any time during the day. Woo hoo. Congrats, but people clearly want far more functionality. Let me watch video clips instead of whole programs, post them, organize them ten different ways, search for them, rate them, and comment them. Google learned that shopping for Videos in a catalog/hierarchical drill down just doesn't work, acted quickly, and made YouTube an offer they couldn't refuse.

Google purchased a technology, a library of videos, and a huge market share. They also got an inked deal with Warner and CBS which, along with some new technology to help manage copyrighted material.

But let's face it, YouTube will have serious competition over the next few years. Imagine when the TV networks figure out how to slice up their video content correctly. Can I go to foodtv.com, search and then watch video recipes? When will the NFL allow fans to create playlists of their favorite clips? Can I order an episode of Seinfeld whenever I want? How about letting me see the first time David Letterman had Madonna on his show?

Bottom line is, there's still a lot of very valuable content that's still not available (or legally available) on YouTube. And as good as their technology and user interfaces are, technologies can be repeated and improved on. So is YouTube worth $1.65B?

GoogleTube still has a lot of work to do.
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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.