The Bangus Ultimatum

Joel Spolsky writes on the horrors of custom development (as opposed to writing shrinkwrap software). I’ve never written any shrinkwrap software. All the code I’ve churned out is a custom job (in house project, or for a specific client). Guess I’ll never know what I missed. True, you can never achieve economies of scale with custom development, but there’s a unique pleasure to crafting small, personal solutions for actual human beings instead of programming features for a theoretical marketing-defined class of users. Most of lawyering (or so I’ve heard) is a series custom jobs. You have specific cases, and each of them would have to involve a different approach. The closest thing to an off-the-shelf legal “solution” I can think of is Creative Commons, but enforcing the licenses in court is still a custom job.

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