''Does Worse Is Better Require Open Source?''
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--- '''WeNeedExamples'''

An Open Source Example 

Do The Right Thing Versus Worse Is Better in Line of Business Software for Your Enterprise
* Acme Consumer Goods is in need of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. 
* Do they write their own app, or do they buy something? 
* Suppose they buy a product that DoesTheRightThing from a commercial vendor. 
** Likelihood is that this baroque package is ''still'' something which they will later regret comitting their company to
** once they are locked into, they will have no choice but to spend a lot of money having high-paid consultants *cough* peopleware *cough* build even more features into their feature-encrusted bloatware Enterprise systems
** probably designed by entire comittees of UML modelers, database administrators, and experts in J2EE and n-tier systems design

Quality? 
* Maybe in a certain way.

A Good Fit? 
* It would be easier to change your company than change how the CRM works.

The other way 
* go with the WorseIsBetter solution, the one that was not over-engineered at the start:
** Employee X downloads an open source web based CRM, and installs it. It is workable enough to get started, but lacks all the bells and whistles. The thing has bugs, which the employee fixes (and contributes back to the open source world). The WorseIsBetter solution only starts out worse; once it is workable, the employee who was maintaining it moves on to something else, and it becomes a stable piece of software. Perhaps some of the employees hate using it, but its place is secure now in the organization.

The open source twist here is that WorseIsBetter can only fly in your organization (instead of killing your organization's IT capabilities) if you do WorseIsBetter with 100% open source free software. Otherwise Worse is always Worse.

-- WPostma (with a little help from the Gnomes)
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Despite being something of a free software advocate, I think this doesn't necessarily follow. Obvious example:
* Unix was not open source at the time that RPG wrote the paper. 
* All that's necessary is that the software be cheap and hackable, but nobody says you ''have'' to be able to feed your changes back.
-- DanBarlow

''And 'hackable' means that you have to have the source code, and that seems to be what the original auther meant by OpenSource.''

Doesn't even need that. Lisp vs. C (one of the original examples) didn't depend on a hackable C compiler.

Uhh...are we discussing compilers and IDEs, or user-ready products?
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