Wed, 04 Aug 2004

$170 per line plus a company

To followup on my earlier comments on this story, Adrian Sutton has directed me to a much better version of the story by Ken Coar in which it appears that the $US85M was the price paid for the company which originally developed the software. Just goes to show that news organisations can’t ever be trusted to get a story, even a simple one, right. It’s still an utterly absurd way to ascribe value to software.

Posted at: 21:08

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$170 per line

I’ve now seen several news stories that claim that IBM has announced that it is going to donate half a million lines of its source code to an open source software group. That’s neither here nor there. The bit that startled me in the stories was the claim that IBM valued this code at $US85M—which works out to $US170 per line. That’s incredibly expensive, even for IBM.

On one hand, it makes me wonder what my customers would have said if I’d costed my code like that—a recent project that I did for $AU50k should have cost $AU2.6M at that rate. Might have been fun for me, but the client could not have paid—and would never have been stupid enough to contemplate paying that much. And it’s inconceivable that IBM corporate code is that much more valuable than the stuff I write. I spent enough time as a consultant to IBM to know about their code quality. It could not possibly be valued in the way this has been reported. Perhaps the news stories are wrong. Maybe it’s all part of the anti-SCO program. But it’s crazy.

Posted at: 17:57

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Stupid banks

I guess everybody knows that banks are stupid and most of us have plenty of anecdotal evidence of that. Here’s one more item. Last week, I went to the bank to close my mother’s account. I explained that she had died so that they would just do everything in one go. We played with an endless array of forms and spent the best part of an hour on this simple task. One of the delays was to arrange for the necessary calculations for fees, interest, etc., to be incorporated in the final balance. Finally, a figure was pulled from the air and a bank cheque was provided (made out to the funeral directors as part payment of their gigantic bill). So far, so good.

Today, as promised, a statement arrived. However, instead of showing a nil balance and a closed account, it showed a debit balance of $5-49. What’s wrong with these people? Stupid question. Just about everything you can think of is wrong with them. And they can’t even count.

Posted at: 12:17

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