The Software Compass

The Software Compass

[Andrei Șova]

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    I've been able to call myself a "serious" computer user for about
    six years at this point, during which I've used a lot of
    software. Interestingly I've noticed there are a few different
    ideological "camps" most software fits in.

    The traditional political compass is defined in two axes: social
    views on the y-axis, and economic on the x-axis (the accuracy of
    this model is another story). I posit that a similar compass exists
    for software.

    I call the first axis "innovation." Software that scores high on
    this tends to seek to rewrite conventions or paradigms. On the other
    hand, software that scores low is likely to want to preserve
    traditions.

    The second axis I call "absolutism." Software that scores high tends
    to assert their conventions as the ones that should be followed by
    everyone, while the ones that score low accept many different
    paradigms.

    There is also the possibility of a third axis, "minimalism." This
    one is pretty self explanatory and also introduces a lot of
    confusion since it's different to visualize a 3D space and this
    doubles the number of regions into octants.

    Of course this is pretty obvious and probably already thought of by
    someone else, but I think this is a fun framework. systemd is
    definitely in the first quadrant ;)

    - sova
    

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Re: The Software Compass

[Preston Pan]

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A very throughtful post. I'm glad I read it :).

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