On Wednesday 16 August 2006 10:32, _ langagemachine wrote:
[...]
> On a more general keynote, is it not paradoxical that when a piece
> of software becomes mature enough, it tends to fade out of the
> general attention ?
Are you sure that's actually what happens, in the general case?
A project in development generates a lot of noise for obvious reasons;
user questions, bug reports, feature sugestions etc. Potential and
actual users are attracted by this noise, maybe hoping for a much
better solution than what they've been using before. Lots of
attention there, but what is the ratio between interested bystanders
and actual users/testers, actually? :-)
When a project matures, most of that noise goes away. Stuff works as
intended, documentation is in a usable state and potential users can
try the software out on their own. Active users focus on the job at
hand rather than the tools they're using, and if the tools work as
expected, everyone is happy - and quiet.
So, even if there is generally less noise around mature projects, the
software can still have a large active user base. If there are no
problems, users generally won't say much.
Also, considering the number of dependencies the average application
has these days, only the highest profile libraries, if any, are
mentioned for marketing reasons. How many applications have badges
and stuff for every single library or technology they depend on?
One would think that "integration technologies" should always be
advertised all over the place, so you know whether or not the
application will work in your setup, but I guess developers in
general aren't all that much into marketing... :-)
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.------- http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples -------.
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'-- http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation --'
Received on Wed Aug 16 20:15:02 2006
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