Category Archives: Software Business

Thoughts on software development as a business/career

The New Wheel: A Software Engineering Parable

By Robert Fischer | Published: December 16, 2009

In the early days of humankind, a young man excitedly ran up to the leader of the tribe. “You won’t believe it! I have an awesome invention! See, I know that our parents invented the wheel, but the wheel has all kinds of problems. It’s too hard to produce. It rolls away on you when you want to stand still. It’s hard to understand and to describe to people—’it’s like a thin slice of smooth rock with a hole in the middle’ isn’t exactly easy to grok.”

Also posted in Classic | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Self-Destructive Side of Open Source Software

By Robert Fischer | Published: December 14, 2009

There’s a bit of a misunderstanding about the economics open source software. Most importantly, people seem to be missing that commercializing open source software seems to be fundamentally self-destructive.

Also posted in Classic, Open Source | 12 Comments

Marc Palmer: “Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?”

By Robert Fischer | Published: December 11, 2009

If you are a Grails developer who hasn’t read Marc Palmer’s blog post, “Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?“, you need to do so. Now. I’ll wait. The crux of the problem is adequately described in Marc’s GraphJam-worthy graph: The problem is, this leads to a bunch of great ideas that are [...]

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New Version of Autobase: Payware?

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 27, 2009

Since nobody’s come out of the woodwork to fund the Autobase Grails plugin, but that plugin desperately needs a new version and extensions, so I’m considering working on it over the holidays and releasing it early next year as payware, or perhaps under a GPL/payware scheme a la Zed Shaw’s GPL approach or Clojure’s use [...]

Also posted in Autobase | 11 Comments

Grails Retainer

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 6, 2009

In the past, I have been picked up on some projects for my specialty with Groovy DSLs, GORM, and Grails infrastructure. I am a specialist in those areas, and my rate reflects that. The problem came in if there wasn’t enough DSL/GORM/infrastructure work to be doing: I would then be shifted to other development tasks, [...]

Also posted in Autobase | Leave a comment

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