The problem, to add to the buildings metaphor, is that we don't have a few thousand years of experience building software under our collective belt yet. We quite literally don't know how to build good software. Or rather: we are still figuring out how to build good software, and we don't know yet how far along we are in this process. Therefore it looks like a questionable idea to set the things that we currently believe to be true in stone.
We're also never building the same software (or at least very rarely). The industry is such that we're always trying to invent something new, something that hasn't been done before.
If you build the same (or near same) piece of software 100 times, you can know almost exactly how long it'll take and you can do it quickly, same as if you were building 100 buildings. But we don't do that, because you build software once then just copy it 100 times.
You only build software if you're making something new that hasn't been made before.
> You only build software if you're making something new that hasn't been made before.
Or has been proprietary. This is why we should choose copyleft licenses over permissive ones.
This project I am working on is a bit boring, outsourced (or exploited) here in my country. It's about ETL, transferring data from prod db to analytics db.. I am of the opinion that all this is a solved problem and I am probably repeating mistakes. However, due to the nature of Capitalism, exploitation ....
I've been there. I even got a fair way into discussing starting a 'data migration' startup. Customers only care about getting their data migrated and wouldn't mind you holding the rights to the software tools you write to do it so you could get better and better as you build up your toolkit.
