Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Statistically speaking software development is extremely risky from the point of view that n units of work will create x units of deliverables.

If you are not a software shop you really would like to outsource those risks.

Hence, they pay the capital cost to get a fixed, known deliverable.

Developing new software is hard and risky. Sure, if you can get the right team for the job it can work out wonderfully but this just creates another level of risk - you need to find the right developers.

View on HN

If someone wants fixed, known deliverables, the last thing they should be looking at is proprietary software, where a seemingly stable product suddenly updates and everything is different and the license changes retroactively, e.g Photoshop. Version controlled, open source means you can check out any version you might need, at any time, now and forever. Seems worth throwing some money at such a promise.

Spoken like someone that doesn't own a business. You do not throw money at promises. You throw money at solutions.

Possibly a better phrasing would be "An open source ecosystem is worth investing in to hedge against the risk of license and source changes by the vendor"

If you are short sighted enough to only care about day to day operations and don't see competence in software usage as an investment that will bring competitive advantages in the long run.

Your competitive advantage is your staff, not your software. A company like Pixar only has so many proprietary tools because they've been around so damn long that rolling their own was the only way to go to get the results they wanted.

Even then, Pixar's advantage was the people they hired and allowed to thrive... not Renderman.

I agree; software people tend to think about business in terms of software. But if you're a production company then you should focus on your core competency and outsource software development. You generally don't have the in house expertise to manage software projects.

Conversely, if you're a software company and have media production needs, you generally don't in-house it — you focus on your core competency and outsource media production.

Software people tend not to question outsourcing when it's done by a software company outsourcing things outside their core competency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com