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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  4046 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

    The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Yes, that's pretty good, thanks. He makes two points:

    I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.
He supports the first point well, but I don't see the values by which he makes the second claim. Is market dominance the measuring rod of quality?




user-inactivated  ·  4046 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In the sense that lasting is a mark of quality, yes. Software without users doesn't get maintained, either because no one's paying for it or because no one cares enough to do the work, and software that isn't maintained bitrots away.