Source code shame

Written on 13 Jan 2019

I suspect that that many companies don’t publish their source code not because they’re against the idea of it, but because they’re ashamed of the quality. Publishing the source – either as open source of ‘source available’ – will mean showing your entire customer base what a bloody mess it is.

With a closed code base, you can fix most issues “silently” without too many customers noticing there was actually a really embarrassing bug or security issue. You can’t really do this with open source software. Got an embarrassing bug because of unprofessional and careless programming? Everyone can see.

This is a rather sorry state of things, but unfortunately a lot of software just plain ol’ sucks. Is there open source software that sucks? Sure. But at least it forces programmers to be honest about it.

Here’s Dennis Ritchie’s comments on the BUGS section in Unix man pages:

Our habit of trying to document bugs and limitations visibly was enormously useful to the system. As we put out each edition, the presence of these sections shamed us into fixing innumerable things rather than exhibiting them in public. I remember clearly adding or editing many of these sections, then saying to myself “I can’t write this,” and fixing the code instead.

A public issue tracker is the modern variant of maintaining a BUGS section in the man page.