Some Assembly Required And Batteries Not Included
There are a lot of software frameworks out there, most available for ‘free’ as in a Siren’s Song. The laws of thermodynamics are still in effect, making most of these worth something less than their original price.
Frameworks certainly fill a number of needs in software systems development, and we sold a lot of ours before that market became saturated. Of course, we sold ours for real money, and worked with the customers for two weeks, typically, to get them quickly up to speed. We also provided a lot of documentation that was in cook-book, follow the numbers style to flatten the learning curve as much as possible.
This last aspect is probably the most challenging issue with the current crop. After working with a number of open source frameworks, the hardest part of learning how to apply them is the lack of a ‘Start Here’ point. Instead, much like trying to get a sip of water out of a main fire hydrant, information is presented flat, with any organization a reflection of the author, and not for the convenience of a user.
While these are available at no cost, the certainly aren’t ‘free’. None of them work out of the box, requiring someone to invest time to get them to be useful, and as everyone knows, time is money.
Getting from A to B presents the choice of three doors.
Door Number 1: Learn how to use it by studying the available documentation. If it exists, then be prepared for incredibly badly written technobabel, more than likely written without benefit of having successfully passed English 1A in school. Learning by reviewing the code will certainly take longer, as there is an assumed requirement of clairvoyance, and if you can’t figure it out then you deserve all the bad things that invariably will happen, not least missing a milestone or a payroll. Like the development environments in which these frameworks exist, there’s way too much clerk-typist work to make becoming a master a real drudge.
Door Number 2: Write your own framework. Sometimes tempting because not everything in the framework is needed, just a subset that is imagined to be small. Included for completeness; no upside, a number of downsides. First, there’s no reason to believe that home grown code will be any better. Then there’s the problem of maintenance of any kind, much less without documentation because there’s no time to do it. Bad idea. Does seem to be appealing to those who still live at home or with dorm buddies, lots of time and no sense of its value, who might aspire to bragging rights by fostering yet another ‘free’ framework on the world.
Door Number 3: Identify exactly what’s needed and build those and only those. Add them to a Lego Library for the future. More often than not the best approach, provided that the system design is well partitioned and what’s needed isn’t huge. Remember that time is money.
Finally, the ‘free’ is a bit of a problem. Bluntly, giving things that could be production tools away not only associates no value to both whatever is free and the time it took to make it. And, all kinds of bad things can lie hidden within when whatever the free thing is hasn’t passed the discipline of a market and customers who do invest in these things.
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Tags: frameworks, freeware, market discipline, open source, software design