[ILUG] CALIBRE

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Justin Mason wrote:

> http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9551214.html
>
>   'The EU-funded CALIBRE project will aim [to] change the current
>   circumstance of the Open Source software (OSS) development model by
>   organising conferences and well as an "influential" European Industrial
>   Forum -- consisting of Europe's top companies -- who will formulate policy
>   in relation to Open Source. Part of the project will also be to compile a
>   database of Open Source success stories as well as document and distribute
>   best practices.'
>

On the great spectrum of utterly clueless to amazingly clued, I think
they're starting way, way off in the shallow end, but have got funding to
explore the deeper water, even though they have really no idea what's out
there, and have (probably) never written any code.

Get a load of this....

      Software engineering challenges:

          Code quality is not assured given the "we accept code from
          strangers" principle

	  Maintainability problems likely due to excessive modularity of
          code

	  Unavailability of sufficient developer talent to scale to
	  increased interest & demand for libre software products


Yeah, these three have been really big problems for Linux.  I mean, poor
code quality, too many modules, and not enough talent.  Big shame really.

It looks like jobs-for-the-boys in UCC and UL.  A collaboration between a
dozen institutions in different countries is a standard academic tactic
(it's politically harder to revoke funding if there's an international
angle).  I may be wrong, and if anybody cares to show up and explain my
error, fire away.

Ronan