> It's expensive to produce a custom microprocessor, but it's cheaper than it's ever been.
My impression is that it's more expensive these days, which is why we don't see as many startups like MOS or Acorn, and see instead partnerships between larger companies. It also seems less likely for anyone producing an ASIC to get funded in the first place these days. I couldn't find good data to settle the cost issue, though.
> I am comparing a random engineer in your company (cathedral) to one of your customer support staff who is requesting a copy change (bazaar).
I don't understand this argument. I'm not sure what "copy change" means in context, and I don't know how customer support relates to the discussion.
I guess the main point I was trying to make was that the tooling for bazaar-style development is at your fingertips from the moment you sit down at a computer, but the cathedral is harder to make and the publicly available tools aren't as good.
Customer support are the people who know which words in the software should change to confuse customers less. When I say "copy change" I mean changing some words in the software. The barrier to entry I'm talking about is the one preventing that support person from making that change, instead of having to ask their boss to ask one of the engineering bosses to ask one of the engineers to do it.
Okay, but if you lift that barrier there is still a major fundamental problem: the people in customer support don't know how to code. The few people in customer support I've known who knew how to code changed jobs on fairly short order.
The fact is, even in the bazaar model where the barrier is low, when does customer support make code changes? I'm talking here about instances where customer support for open-source projects exists.
My impression is that it's more expensive these days, which is why we don't see as many startups like MOS or Acorn, and see instead partnerships between larger companies. It also seems less likely for anyone producing an ASIC to get funded in the first place these days. I couldn't find good data to settle the cost issue, though.
> I am comparing a random engineer in your company (cathedral) to one of your customer support staff who is requesting a copy change (bazaar).
I don't understand this argument. I'm not sure what "copy change" means in context, and I don't know how customer support relates to the discussion.
I guess the main point I was trying to make was that the tooling for bazaar-style development is at your fingertips from the moment you sit down at a computer, but the cathedral is harder to make and the publicly available tools aren't as good.