floof.org
Brief blog article: “Symbiosisware”.
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/symbiosisware/
that is interesting because it is the direct opposite of software that I often run into: Software written be developers who clearly do not use it themselves.
This is software characterised by having both flaws and just weird behaviour that no developer would accept in their daily use if they had any way of using an alternative or fixing the software.
I see this a lot in e.g. vendor supplied toolchains.
I like open source tools a lot for various reasons, but I can't think of a single example which has flaws or behaviour which drives you up the wall in the same way that a lot of commercial software does.
maybe I phrased things a bit too loosely. One specific example is a commercial compiler which comes with a kind of IDE which is just *terrible*.
For instance, it has rudimentary support for looking up symbols but sometimes this just ceases to work, and there appears no way to fix it outside of deleting your project and starting over, waiting for it to happen again. Sometimes it crashes etc.
A coworker routinely imports 3D models of PCBs and enclosures into FreeCAD and re-export them because otherwise our expensive suite for 3D work grinds to a halt working on them.
I don't recall ever running into something like this in OSS -- okay, perhaps in a few cases were it could be described as symbiosisware -- but in commercial software I'd be inclined to call it prevalent.
Edit: spello
@mk aaah, IDEs. That makes more sense.
In my day job I maintain toolchains myself, it so happens. We do have IDEs to wrap around those toolchains, but I never use them – I run the compiler directly from the command line. So indeed I wouldn't notice if the IDE had misfeatures, only the underlying compiler and linker etc.
(In fact I'm not an IDE user in any context, being long-term committed to emacs.)
