pheloniusfriar | Re: frickin BRAVO! (Reply)

From:

I think you got the idea of what I was writing, I was just talking about something very specific. You (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) pushed a major button when you dissed the software (no matter how deserving it was of such comments). I wasn't angered or upset in any way, fyi, it is just that anyone who hasn't actually worked on open source software isn't likely to understand how software that forms a critical part of the operation of societies all around the world can be clunky and/or broken. The answer is that it was developed and is maintained by a loose collective at best, and an anarchic chaotic community at worst (this still, amazingly, often works amazingly well). One such example is LibreOffice, which has been mandated for use in government business by many governments around the world (saving taxpayers millions of dollars a year where deployed and helping to preserve the integrity of the data and documents stored in LibreOffice's open document format [itself an open source project]... an integrity destroyed by Microsoft's propritary, closed, and forever changing formats). In many cases, for instance ROOT, the software was developed on the foundations of other software (e.g. PAW in the case of ROOT) in order to meet more modern requirements or to take advantage of contemporary computing capabilities. When you consider that ROOT was developed as a tool suite to allow a globally distributed collaboration of physicists to search for the Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC, the importance of these sorts of software packages becomes evident (consider that it cost roughly $13.5 billion [with a "b"] dollars to find the Higgs boson, and it continues to cost roughly $1 billion a year to operate the LHC, and if, for all its barnacles, ROOT couldn't do the job, that money would be have been and continue to be wasted). As a note, fyi, the CMS experiment, which is ATLAS's cousin on the other side of the LHC ring uses a completely separate and independently developed software suite (uncreatively called "CMS Software") to perform analysis on data received at that detector... the idea being that if there was an error buried in the ROOT software, that both sets of measurements wouldn't be affected. As an aside... CMS stands for "Compact Muon Solenoid"... which is ironic considering it weighs 12,500 tons. As a last aside, ATLAS has the lamest name in the history of physics, it actually and for real stands for "A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS"... it makes me stabby every time I think about it ;). Those folk were definitely trying too hard...

$13.5 billion to find the Higgs bo'sun? Huh, what's all the fuss about?