"The mother of invention is not necessity but irritation." from Henry Petrowski in The Evolution of Useful Things. This indeed gives me a different angle in thinking of creative thinking. Everything evolves, invention is never optimal.
From a software perspective, an agile architecture that could help evoloving is a winning design -- that is the motive of OO, Componenta Based, Pattern Based, Plug-In Based design etc anyway. The more all the entities loosely decoupled, the easier for each to evolve, the earlier for the collective design to reach temporary optimal.
The fittest survive. Open source tends to fit this rule of nature. Closed source loses much of these opportunities of mutation. Imaging how many times you have frustration or irritation over certain aspects of software which does not meet what you want. It would be a lof of efforts if you have ever thought of duplicating (thus preserving) the good part of it and changing the unwanted part - sometimes the efforts just could not be justified. This reminds me Journal.
Open source is as cruel, would you ever think of enhance anything if you do not like it much at the first place?
Posted
Feb 02 2004, 11:18 PM
by
blackinkbottle