[seiji]

We know how to do a lot of things well, but when all our tools are made by hobbyist hackers creating out of love of fun instead of love of sustainability (or worse, short term hacks for love of profit), we end up with the mess we have now.

[davidw]

A big point of the article is that what we have now is 'good enough' for most people, since they're not paying for more. If they were paying a bunch more, they'd get better stuff. But they don't want to. So the hand-wringing and finger pointing is useless: it's best to figure out how to get the most from what we do have.

If you really want to work on super high quality stuff, there are fields where that is valuable.

[seiji]

Well, our base tools are crap.

C is awful. Linux is awful. Docker "containers" are awful (i.e. fancy branding around cgroups; no actual 'container' at all unlike solaris zones which did everything properly 10 years ago plus Crossbow networking 5 years ago).

We keep using (and inventing) quick hacks promoted by braggadocious personalities instead of stable infrastructure or proper tooling.

[davidw]

The article is attempting to explain the economics of why that is so. It's a pretty important thing to understand.

Other pieces of the economic puzzle are things like network effects and lock in. I highly recommend this book: http://amzn.to/1FTa7ib

[seiji]

Thanks for the pointers. Looks fancy. I'll check it out.