Back in 2022, surrounded by colleagues who were infused with "open source scepticism", I wrote "Open Source in Enterprise Environments - Where Are We Now and What Is Our Way Forward?" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/opensource_enterprise_notes.html as an explainer.
Hopefully a useful thing for others too, with links therein #freesofware #opensource #enterprise #openbsd #freebsd #netbsd #linux
Since the original came out, I have made updates here and there, and added references to some newer material.
You could see "EU CRA: It's Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up!" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/eu_cra_its_later_than_you_think_time_to_engineer_up.html as a further development in response to the real world (or at least the EU parts) moving forward.
One important aspect /all/ people overlook, including you:
Aircraft carriers are /simple/ compared to software.
Building a modern air-craft carrier takes merely one million different stock-numbers.
/bin/bash is 200k lines
Last I looked SystemD was north of 1M
All of FreeBSD is 26 million lines.
Linux kernel alone is 36 million lines.
Ohh, and also this old rule of thumb:
"Well written code typically has one bug for every thousand lines."
Quote away, people need to understand it.
PS: I'm pretty sure I also told you in a talk in Bergen some years ago, with nice illustrative pictures :-)
Yeah, very funny.
(By that same metric the aircraft carrier is only made from around 90 parts too, and half of those only because there was no way to get rid of them.)
But the point here is not deconstructionism but complexity: How many individual items do you have to keep track of, and position just right, to complete your project.
@phloggen @pitrh that seems like the least useful comparison ever.
All rivets will have the same stock number, all blank lines between functions are counted separately.
I assume there's at least one computer running one piece of software on an aircraft carrier in a critical role. It probably doesn't even have a stock number separate from whatever it's running on.
Seriously, this comparison is amazing in its ridiculousness. Well trolled.
I can see how you might think so, if the only big projects you have been involved in were software.
To people who have done big projects outside software, 1 million SKU's is a LOT - because it is.
Very few people have tried both, so almost nobody realizes how many orders of magnitude software is more complex than anything else.
Peter N. M. Hansteen
Poul-Henning Kamp
Janneke
Henryk Plötz
Gabe