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: 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> Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1991 05:02:03 GMT In article 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