{"id":815,"date":"2004-01-19T11:36:59","date_gmt":"2004-01-19T15:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=815"},"modified":"2004-01-19T11:36:59","modified_gmt":"2004-01-19T15:36:59","slug":"good-software-is-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=815","title":{"rendered":"Good software is boring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are two astonishing statistics in the latest OpenOffice.org newsletter.<\/p>\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>The first is that nearly 25m downloads of the software have been reported. <span class=\"loony\">24,800,000<\/span> &#8212; that&#8217;s a lot of 60mb downloads, and the rate is climbing steadily.<\/li>\n<li>The second is that while millions of people have tried the software &#8212; and it&#8217;s a reasonable assumption that many are still using it &#8212; hardly anyone has hacked on it at all. Let&#8217;s be more precise. 358 people have signed the agreement that allows their changes to be redistributed. That means about 1 in 80,000 users, or 0.0015 per cent.<\/li>\n<li>About 15,000 have signed up for the mailing lists. You wouldn&#8217;t do that unless you needed help (I&#8217;m tempted to add &#8216;professional help&#8217;). So, mostly, it works without too much explanation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Put all these statistics together, and they say that software is widely attractive when it behaves as if it were commercial, and doesn&#8217;t demand interest or ideological commitment from its users. But we knew that already, so it must be true.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are two astonishing statistics in the latest OpenOffice.org newsletter. The first is that nearly 25m downloads of the software have been reported. 24,800,000 &#8212; that&#8217;s a lot of 60mb downloads, and the rate is climbing steadily. The second is &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=815\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=815\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}