Sunday, April 20, 2003
The principle of "good enough" -POGE
Sometimes a submeme resonates until it reaches a supersaturated point... then - wham, it crystalizes in a short phrase that contains all the meaning you need to hang a discussion on.
Doc wrote yesterday about POGE - the principle of "good enough".
Heh. I wrote about that, about a year ago. I called it the rule of good enough. It's been a guide for my technical choices as both a programmer and as a manager for nearly two decades. It's worked more often than not (and got me in trouble with managers that preferred powerpoint presentations, press releases and marketing materials over actually looking at the code or running the software).
Doc wrote:
- One advantage of POGE is gradual improvement. From their beginnings, all members of the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, Perl, PostgreSQL) have been triumphantly adequate efforts. Their adequacy keeps growing, of course, because so many who apply them contribute back to their steady improvement. But their appeal remains a matter of uncomplicated utility, not does-it-all polypurposefulness. And that seems to be the main difference between XMPP and SIMPLE.
I like the acronym "POGE" over "ROGE", (although I often felt like a rogue when I dragged OSS into an organization, or had to defend it from PHBs) - so whenever I get the dozen pages I've written on the topic over the past year blogable, I'll do that. I've got some examples that doc didn't use - 802.11b vs bluetooth is one - and I have some data showing the growth and change of open source projects over the past 5 years that ties into it. OK, some text, some graphs, a workable acronym, hot dang I've got a theme! Maybe there will be some net-wide discussion on this rule, because it explains so much about the growth of open technologies vs proprietary ones.
but, hey, it's sunday, first - I'm going surfing! There's a big swell due in by noon. Symbolic?
¶ 8:56 AM
