Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic

Corporate computing has been making progress by transitioning through three fairly predictable phases:

1. Vendor-giddy
2. Vendor-neutral
3. Vendor-averse

Let’s explain each of the three phases.

Vendor-giddy

Typical for the early stages of adopting computing technology in the corporation. Lack of competence gets to be appeased by the reassuring astronomical bill submitted by the chosen vendor.

“No one ever got fired for recommending <insert your sweetheart vendor here>” becomes the magic ‘cover your ass’ slogan.

Vendor-neutral

After being burnt one too many times by the vendor sweetheart of choice (be it the ‘true blue’ IBM, or the ‘fundamentalist software jihad mongers from Redmond, WA’, or any other prominent tool vendor), corporations realize that it’s much safer to choose the vendor-neutral course. At that point, the cooler heads tend to prevail, and the decision to ‘write once, run anywhere’ gets implemented.

What the corporate honchos are saying at this point is: we realize that our code will run on some vendor platform, we just don’t want to commit to any particular vendor. We’re vendor-neutral.

Vendor-averse

Inevitably, there comes a point when corporations must realize that vendor-neutrality is not the safe way out. There’s just too much at stake here, and vendors, though pretending to be ‘write once, run anywhere’ friendly, are not shy when it comes to trying to rig the game.

The only real escape from this untenable position is to get rid of the incompetence altogether. There are two ways to deal with a thorny world:

1. Work on carpeting the entire world
2. Work on making shoes with soles strong enough to withstand walking on thorns

The ‘carpet the entire world’ approach is the vendor-giddy approach. It simply cannot work, because it’s totally childish, er, infantile.

The only way to cope with the thorny world is to learn to make one’s own shoes. And for that, one needs to gain some real competence. No more relying on flaky vendors to cover our butts.

Not only that, but one learns to become positively vendor-averse. One learns to start avoiding any vendor brewed solution. Vendors get equated with crap, and as such get eschewed from one’s attempts to find the solution.

Only when we get to the vendor-aversion point, will we be able to deliver truly workable software solutions.