Jaslabs: High performance Software

By Justin Silverton

In a recent article:

“In his first “meet the press” session as ICT Minister, Professor Sitthichai Pokai-udom put forth his radical vision for 3G in Thailand, condemned open source for turning out buggy, useless software and promised to make the civil servants in the ICT Ministry proud of their organisation once again.

Speaking at the IT Press Club, Minister Sitthichai said that he was looking for an investment of around 20 billion baht for Thai Mobile and between 10 and 18 billion for CAT in order to complete the roll-out of next generation communication networks for the two former state enterprises.

Sitthichai said on detailed questioning that Thai Mobile would upgrade its network and operate a WCDMA 3G network while CAT Telecom would roll out a CDMA2000 EV-DO network.

He said that rather than using public money to compete with the private sector, he expected today’s private mobile operators to gladly become partners to CAT and TOT and effectively lease their networks and focus on the marketing aspect. He reasoned that none of the incumbents would want to invest in a 3G network as 4G would come along in five years and render today’s investments obsolete.”

While I don’t completely agree with the stance that all open source applications are bug-ridden and useless, he does make a good point. I have used many open source applications over the years and many were either bug-ridden, barely functional, or they lacked basic functionali.

Open source sounds like a great concept. The idea is that since the code is open, there is a possibility for more programmers to see the code and create new functionality or fix bugs. This does happen to some degree, but because of the overwhelming number of contributers, many of the projects are subjected to in-fighting, politics, and eventual destruction.

While this is a part of any project, there needs to be more organization for a project to be successful. This involves assigning leaders and only accepting code into the main codebase that meets a certain standard. Many of the larger and more popular projects are using this method and have less bugs as a result (and are around much longer).

If more open source projects followed better project management practices, We would see much better projects an it would benefit both the users and the programming comunity.