NOTA BENE

April 26, 2008

Moore’s law for the opensource or the tower of Babilon

Filed under: Computers — mikhailp @ 9:44 am

Nick Tredennick [in his talk “Computing in Transition” at SFBA ACM Chapter] reminded that Moore’s law is not just about chip’s performance, but also explains the economic of technology.
Debates organic vs. non-organic touched a similar problem, but on the side of software development.
In fact, Moore’s law can proof the reason why we need both organic and non organic opensource projects by the following explanation: today, we could not sustain the economic of software development either, because cycles between hardware updates become shorter and shorter, so the traditional corporate way to develop software is failing to catch up the exponential growth of Moore’s improvements in a silicon.
The opensource responses to the growing problem by drafting masses in development process with a goal  to reduce the cost of software development  [in other words, we are trying to compensate the exponential growth of hardware by the volume of developers in software], sort of a new Tower of Babylon. Sooner or later, the complexity in the coordination of developers will be close to the hardware and opensource projects will face the similar corporate difficulties in software. To reduce the complexity, new development methods and computation abstractions  need to been changed or revised, but in last decades no progress here been made.
So it looks like, the answer for Moor’s dilemma is out of the opensource debate (it will be part of solution anyway), but pretty much depends on a new solutions which will be provided by the Computer Science [not a computer engineering].

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