From a code perspective, it’s easier to add new features than remove old ones.

From a user perspective, it’s much, much easier to add new features than remove old ones.

Nobody knows about your new feature, but there are at least three people who love that button you added to the toolbar two years ago. Even if no one else cares, they’ll make sure to post angry requests on your forums asking why you got rid of it. If you’re not careful, they’ll accuse your company of “not caring about its users,” or they might even say you “used to be great, but ever since they got successful they’ve started to go downhill”…ever hear that before? [1]

At the same time, it’s important to cut features, or you end up sliding down this curve:

So how do you decide what to cut?

Why Not Just Count?

One of the great things about analytics is getting real data about who’s using what. Every month, Google Analytics sends me an email that tells me exactly what people are reading on this blog. (Hint: It’s not the minesweeper articles)

That gave me an idea: Why not generate similar analytics for a library like jQuery?

There’s a nice list of sites using jQuery available here:

http://docs.jquery.com/Sites_Using_jQuery

Let’s take a site and see what it’s actually using:

(Speaking of wanting to stick to old things, Match.com uses jQuery 1.2…)

Match.com’s landing page is simple enough that we can do an actual list of what calls they make to jQuery, which I’ve uploaded here.

From this, we can tell that the standard selector function $() gets used a lot, as does readCookie and addClass. From there, the next step is to figure out what they’re actually calling.

In the case of jQuery, this is not too hard in principle. Get a version of jQuery, add a line that increments a counter every time a function is used, and inject it into your favorite website. It’s a little too involved for this post, but perhaps in the future (earlier if someone decides to jump in and do it!)

[1] Back in the 90s, Microsoft obsessed about making sure everything from the past worked, even if it mean keeping broken things from earlier versions of Windows:

The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1. In fact if you poke around in the AppCompatibility section of your registry you’ll see a whole list of applications that Windows treats specially, emulating various old bugs and quirky behaviors so they’ll continue to work.

Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:

It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!

The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.

The United Nations, wanting to rid a country of malaria, tries an experiment. Instead of drafting a plan, it sets sells a billion one dollar contracts. Each contract pays out more than one dollar over its term, if and only if malaria is kept to a certain level or lower during that term.

Rather than discuss the problems this plan might have (with finance, governance, etc.), I’ll let you use your imagination to figure out how the free market might find ways around those issues. (This might go on the show.)

First of all, when the Fed prints money, it does make itself richer at the expense of people who hold the currency. That’s called seigniorage, if you’d like a cocktail party word for it, and it results in inflation. A gold standard replaces this fiat money with money that is backed by a certain weight in gold. Because this weight is constant, it eliminates inflation. However, this can have undesirable side effects, and there are very good arguments against reinstating a gold standard.

In a gold standard, the supply of currency is dependent on gold mining, meaning the supply is not controlled. This can result in a currency shortage, deflation, which makes it worthwhile to hoard currency. Milton Friedman argued that this overrestriction of currency was part of the cause of the Great Depression; Ben Bernanke, the current Fed chair, wrote his thesis on that.

The Fed is an strange institution, run by economic technocrats that are insulated from government influence. This makes them seem both shadowy and unaccountable; however, this intentionally insulates them from the rest of government, where election cycles drive a desire to pump money into the economy. (It’s quite an ideological irony that the modern free market economy is dependent on the good intentions of a few economic professors.) Greenspan, the former Fed chair, was known for being nostalgic for the gold standard:

Greenspan famously argued the case for returning to a gold standard in his 1966 paper “Gold and Economic Freedom“, in which he described supporters of fiat currencies as “welfare statists” hell-bent on using monetary printing presses to finance deficit spending. He has argued that the fiat money system of today has retained the favorable properties of the gold standard because central bankers have pursued monetary policy as if a gold standard were still in place.

A fiat currency is far more flexible than a gold backed one in dealing with cyclical recessions (which did, by the way, occur when the gold standard existed as well). Anyone who argues that the Fed can’t hold down currency is not familiar with Fed history; anyone who thinks the a more accountable government institution would necessarily do any better should be careful.

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Second of all, if you love the gold standard and Fed-free currency so much, is it best to go through the government? Private currencies do in fact exist, though their legal status is questionable–perhaps something should be done about that. An official gold standard still involves trusting the feds not to abuse it, as they have done in the past. The fact is, governments always abuse, or are prone to abuse, currency, gold and otherwise; if you really want to avoid this sort of inflationary pressure, then it is necessary to make a responsible government institution, use a non governmental currency, or use a mechanical currency.

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The Fed depends on the ability of economists to manage the money supply in a prudent manner; inflation, when it comes, is an indication (though not necessarily proof) of irresponsibility. There are plenty of objections to such a system, as political as they are economic. But the solutions will not come from tying our money supply to the vagaries of mining a metal that comes out of the ground, or pretending government isn’t run by human beings.

If your government doesn’t have monetary-policy credibility, attempting to establish that credibility by going on the Gold Standard is a recipe for disaster. If your government does have monetary-policy credibility, going on the Gold Standard doesn’t gain you anything…

In my opinion, this view can be equally applied to software. People are motivated to create software through the incentives they get through having control of the intellectual property of the software they create. The incentives are obvious for companies like Google, IBM, and Microsoft. For open source software, however, the incentives are less clear, but are present nonetheless. The Free Software Foundation, for instance, vehemently defends the GPL. For them, the incentives may be less financially driven, but the underlying enabler is the ability they have (through US copyright law) to control the distribution and use of their work. I find it interesting that an organization which so strongly defends its own right to control its work is so vehemently against the rights of musicians and authors from protecting their own work. On their sites badvista.fsf.org and defectivebydesign.org, they explain how DRM is an evil technology that prevents you from using your computer. DRM is a technology which allows content producers to specify how they want their work to be used and distributed (and thus protect their rights under US copyright law).

So this begs the question, is the campaign against DRM a technology issue or an ideological struggle? This is plausibly a technology issue, since DRM technology in its current incarnations pretty much sucks. Then shouldn’t there be a push to do DRM technology in a technologically sound way? With all the smart people out their working on Linux and related technologies, can’t we come up with a way to ensure that copyright holders can maintain control of their work in a technologically sound way? But what if this is an ideological struggle? Then it certainly seems as if the FSF is somewhat hypocritical, since it seems to believe it has the right to control its work, but musicians and artists do not.

My two cents.

2) As a result of the societal illusion of objectivity, people can be fooled into believing that news is objective, thus causing them to think in the way the reporter thinks. But much worse than that, people may assume this way of thinking is objective.

Humans have opinions. Trying to judge the world critically and objectively is good. Pretending that one can throw away their biases when doing so for others is dishonesty.

Logically, there are three positions you can have on open source and closed source software. If you have an opinion on the issue at all, it must be that 1) All software should be open, 2) Some software should be open, and some should be closed, or 3) All software should be closed. However, I have never met a programmer who believes that all software should be closed. Even at Microsoft, the supposed bastion of closed-source software, the developers regularly release open source code, in the form of documentation, utilities, samples, and a multitude of projects on codeplex. So in reality, this is a war between the belief that all software should be open source, and the belief that some software should be open source.

The belief that all software should be open source is championed by Richard M Stallman. He asserts that proprietary closed-source software is unethical and immoral, and this sentiment is reflected in the terms of the GPL. Specifically, the GPL specifies that all derivative works must also be released under the GPL. This means that if I release any software that is based on GPL software, I must also release my software under a GPL compatible license. The GPL spreads to every work that it touches, irrevocably and irreversibly. Sound familiar? That’s because my description could just have easily been that of a virus. The GPL is a virus that attempts to enforce its view of the world on everyone it touches. When I worked for IBM (one of those supposed champions of open source), we were not even allowed to look at GPL code for fear of our own code becoming tainted.

Is software really free if I can’t even look at it for fear of legal repercussions? Stallmanites would likely argue that IBM is morally obligated to release their software under an open source license anyway, so why is it such a problem? The problem is that without an economic incentive, the software would never get developed, and the only business model that has been shown to be viable with open source software is the “support model.” Under this model, companies release their software for essentially no charge, but then charge their customers for support contracts. Unfortunately, this business model is completely unviable for a huge range of software industries. As an easy example, look at the video game industry. What gamer would pay for a support contract? And there are plenty of other examples where the support model obviously doesn’t work, especially in the domain of consumer oriented software.

Anyone who thinks I’m an “open-source hater” should check out my website; all of my code is released under a public domain license (the only truly Free license). But I need to work for a living, which is why I work for Microsoft. I have a feeling that most people are in the same boat as me. We need to work for a living, and companies need to make money to survive and keep paying us. Not all of us have the ability to support ourselves from speakers’ fees and prize money. So while we contribute where we can to support the community, we still plug away at our day jobs. Stop disrespecting us Stallman.

4) Linux and BSD distributions are more configurable and modular

It’s hard to argue with this point, since Linux and BSD really are more configurable and modular. However, built into this statement is the implication that configurability and modularity are always good things. This is a classic mistake that programmers make when designing user interfaces. More options is better, right? Not always. Any good writer or UI designer knows that sometimes the things that are left out are just as important as the things left in. How many users really need that much configurability? Almost none.

3) Linux and BSD perform better on any given platform

This is a classic apples-oranges comparison. “My simple UI performs faster than your modern UI any day of the week“. Well, duh. What’s implied here, however, is that a program running on Linux will perform better than that same program compiled for Windows. I’ve never seen any benchmarks that support this claim.

Perhaps if this claim was actually saying “Linux and BSD extend the useful lifetime of obsolete computers” then we would probably agree. Unfortunately, this isn’t a relevant claim as far as I am concerned. Any computer that can’t run XP is really not going to be that fun to use with Linux either. Is open office going to load any faster on the P233 running linux compared to the P233 running XP? How about Firefox? Yeah… I don’t think so.

2) Linux and BSD don’t limit your platform choices.

Another point that I can’t argue, but the implication here is that it’s intrinsically bad to limit your platform choices. For enterprise applications, this is probably true, but for the average desktop user, there is only one platform anyway. Even if you somehow convinced your gradma to run Linux, does she have any motivation to run it on a Sparc? How about a MIPS machine? Yeah, didn’t think so about that one either.

1) Linux and BSD give you complete freedom to do what the hell you want with your system

I have the most trouble arguing with this point, since for the most part, it’s certainly a valid argument. But again, I question the relevance of the argument. Is there any aspect of the freeness of Linux (free as in speech, not as in beer) that most linux users take advantage of that Windows users cannot? The only thing that I can think of is access to the source code for Linux, and that’s just because I’m a huge nerd and like to learn stuff about OS design. For the average user, this is really not a huge issue.

I will not draw the conclusion that “Windows is better than Linux”, since such a claim has an intrinsic evaluation criteria that needs to be stated. This is something that people rarely seem to mention when making a value judgement. There are two parts to a value judgement, the evaluation criteria and the argumentation supporting the claim that using said evaluation critera, item X is “better” than item Y. Sometimes, people focus purely on the argumentation supporting the claim. This would be the same as arguing that Linux and BSD distributions are not more configurable and modular than Windows. While this may or may not be a supportable claim, the fact is that if the evaluation criteria is inappropriate, the truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant.

(courtesy: Motivator: Create your own custom poster)