Back when I was preparing to take an honours year, I wrote an circulated several project proposals. One was to explore the argument above with a constructive project -- writing a blog[1].
An example I gave for the inner platform effect was the Wordpress file wp-cron.php.
It gets called on every request made to Worpdress because WP has no other way to arrange for scheduled tasks to be carried out. So you get a performance hit and your scheduling relies on stochastic sampling. Oh, and it stops working very well when (as inevitably happens) you slather Wordpress with caching.
In an OS-up design, you just delegate this to cron.
Or plugins. In a standard current design, these can't be isolated. In an OS-up design, you can can make them standalone programs with separate accounts that can't reach into and interfere with the core code. No more broken sites from a PHP error in a hastily-installed plugin. Similarly, you can control their access into the database (instead of having a shared login that all code running in the application shares).
And so on, and so forth.
[1] I'm happy to forward copies of the proposal. My email is in my profile.
Back when I was preparing to take an honours year, I wrote an circulated several project proposals. One was to explore the argument above with a constructive project -- writing a blog[1].
An example I gave for the inner platform effect was the Wordpress file wp-cron.php.
It gets called on every request made to Worpdress because WP has no other way to arrange for scheduled tasks to be carried out. So you get a performance hit and your scheduling relies on stochastic sampling. Oh, and it stops working very well when (as inevitably happens) you slather Wordpress with caching.
In an OS-up design, you just delegate this to cron.
Or plugins. In a standard current design, these can't be isolated. In an OS-up design, you can can make them standalone programs with separate accounts that can't reach into and interfere with the core code. No more broken sites from a PHP error in a hastily-installed plugin. Similarly, you can control their access into the database (instead of having a shared login that all code running in the application shares).
And so on, and so forth.
[1] I'm happy to forward copies of the proposal. My email is in my profile.