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From: johnson@cs.uiuc.EDU (Ralph Johnson)
Subject: How to pay for reusable software
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.231849.13410@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
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Reply-To: johnson@cs.uiuc.EDU (Ralph Johnson)
Organization: University of Illinois
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 91 23:18:49 GMT
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For the last few years I have been learning how to make software
reusable.  I have followed the object-oriented road using Smalltalk
and C++.  Software is not naturally reusable, and it is not easy
to write reusable software.  In fact, I have decided that the
biggest problem with software reuse is that reusable software is
so hard to make.  Lots of people seem to be worried about problems
like cataloging software components and how to retrieve a component
from a library of million of components.  I wish that were the
problem!  The real problem is that it is so hard to create reusable
software.

This leads to an interesting problem: how can we afford to pay the
costs of developing reusable software?  If a company is going to 
build several of something then it might be cheaper for it to first
develop a system for producing systems of that kind.  However, it
will certainly not save money on the first system built.  Some
application domains, like graphical user interfaces, are popular
enough that a company can build a set of reusable components and
sell it and make lots of money.  I don't think there are many of
these application domains, and in any case most people seem to
undervalue software and don't want to pay a fair price for it.
Thus, it is only cost-effective to sell software if you can sell a
lot of it, which rules out specialized application domains.

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.  Does anybody have any ideas on how to solve this
problem, whether it is a problem, or (better yet) references to
papers that discuss it?

Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
		 johnson@cs.uiuc.edu