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Comment by howeyc | Hacker News Reader

Wow, two reason for this, one of which I didn't expect (the first).

1. Because the code is so old we don't want to have an intern figure out how to do it. (Adding a switch for a new PCRE, such as /P, is hard) Oh, and reading and understanding licenses is HARD?!?!? WTF?

2. It would break backwards-compatability if we did it. (Well, duh).

I understand now it may not be worth it (powershell/.net is the future or whatever), but really, at no time in the 90's and 00's did you think it may be worth some time?

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>Oh, and reading and understanding licenses is HARD?!?!? WTF?

Hey, man, you know what? Some people want absolutely nothing to do with legal/compliance folk in large bureaucratic companies. Not that they aren't lovely people, but that involving them in your work is more risk/work than it's personally worth.

>but really, at no time in the 90's and 00's did you think it may be worth some time?

Hearkening back to the 90's and 00's, I'd venture to guess that there may have been some amount NIH syndrome at MS with respect to OSS, in addition to uncertainty as to how future inevitable licensing problems would be resolved in courts.

When I worked at Microsoft (disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft) as long as you weren't breaking backward compatibility, it was medium-easy to find the PM of a project you wanted to tweak and volunteer some free evening and weekend time. Never saw a ton of people besides me do it, though, but maybe that's just because you had to keep it under wraps, politically, back then.

> Oh, and reading and understanding licenses is HARD?!?!?

The official word on that, IIRC, is DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ OR UNDERSTAND LICENSES. Send them to LCA, and LCA tends to err on the side of caution.

> Because the code is so old we don't want to have an intern figure out how to do it. (Adding a switch for a new PCRE, such as /P, is hard) Oh, and reading and understanding licenses is HARD?!?!? WTF?

The problem isn't reading and understanding the license: the problem is that you now have to provide security updates in a timely manner for code you don't know. (And relying on upstream alone here doesn't work: you might have a stability policy which means you only want to ship security fixes and not other changes, so you have to be able to separate them out and deal with the conflicts while not knowing the code.)

> did you think it may be worth some time?

So how much would you pay for it, roughly? I'm sure if we find enough people to chip in, it will happen.

Don't be so obtuse, getting a feature in a proprietary operating system when the vendor has a shitload of customers doesn't work that way.

For example, the windows command prompt has been shit forever, only after more than a decade does resize and copy/paste work properly.

Changes happen when they want and on their schedule. You can feel free to throw money in the millions at them, then you might at least have someone talk to you about their direction/plan.

Yes; screenfuls of TL;DR to explain the obvious.

The whole article is just a pretext for celebrating the monumental career achievement of the author of qgrep.

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