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IP: re: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: ]
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 01:39:06 -0400
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 17:03:49 -0400 To: farber () cis upenn edu, ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com From: Brad Cox <bcox () virtualschool edu> Subject: Re: IP: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: [risks] Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"Subject: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates In it, he states "I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge 'How not to make a mess of it,' has *not* been met."Its worse even than that. We haven't even started down the road that mechanical or civil engineers followed to achieve their vaunted maturity. We don't even seem to think that this road is even applicable to software engineering. I'm referring to Open Source and the angst on this list whenever someone proposes to take intellectual property rights seriously. Imagine a Honda engineer proposing to mine his own ore and refine his own steel, or a civil engineer proposing a new home-brewed kind of concrete. But building from first principles is routine for "software engineers". Why? Being made of bits and not atoms, software can be copied so easily it undercuts the market economics that underlie the maturity of other domains. See the link in the signature for my modest efforts to change this. -- --- For industrial age goods there were checks and credit cards. For everything else there is mybank.dom. See http://virtualschool.edu/mybank Brad Cox, PhD; bcox () virtualschool edu 703 361 4751
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- IP: re: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: ] David Farber (May 26)