Open Source and Hot Rods

I was surfing the web the other day and ran into someone linking to this article by Jack Lanier from Edmunds (the automotive newsletter people).

The article's entitled "Friends Don't Let Friends Modify Cars".

From the article:

Today, it's difficult to make cars better and extremely easy to make them worse. Or dangerous.

As a journalist driving modified cars, I've been sprayed with gasoline, boiling coolant, super-heated transmission fluid and nitrous oxide. (The latter was more entertaining than the former.) Several have burst into flames. Throttles have stuck wide open, brake calipers snapped clean off, suspensions ripped from their mounts and seatbelt mounting hardware has dropped into my lap. All this is on top of the expected thrown connecting rod, blown head gasket, exploded clutch, disintegrated turbocharger and broken timing belt.

The vast majority of these vehicles were built by professionals. Many were from big-name tuners. Most performed as if they were constructed in a shop class at a high school with a lax drug policy. Once, after a suspension component fell off a car from a big-name tuner, the car actually handled better.

For every modified and tuner car that performed better than stock, I've driven numerous examples that were slower. If they were quicker, it was often in an area that can't be used on the street. What's the use of gaining 0.2 second in the quarter-mile if the car is slower 0-60 mph? And costs $10,000 more?

[...]

Recently, I autocrossed a pair of Subaru WRXs. One was a dead-stock WRX. The other, a tricked-out STi lowered with stiffer springs, shocks and bars and an exhaust kit and air filter. The STi is supposed to have an advantage of some 70 horsepower. Maybe the exhaust and filter moved the power up in the rev band where it couldn't be used. The lowered, stiffened STi regularly bottomed against its bump stops. When a car hits its bump stops, the spring rate goes to infinity and tire grip drops to near zero. This caused the STi to leap into the worst understeer I've experienced with inflated front tires. Meanwhile, in the unmodified WRX, I could be hard in the throttle at the same point. The result: The dead-stock WRX was at least as quick as the STi and far easier to drive. Easy to make worse, harder to make better

I read this article and was struck by the similarities between this and the open source vs COTS model.

COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software is equivalent to a stock automobile.  They're built by professional engineers, and tested as a whole.  But you don't get to mess with the system.

On the other hand, open source gives you the ability to join the software equivalent of the tuner/modified market - you can tweak the system to your hearts content.  You may make it go faster, but you're not totally sure what it's going to do to the overall quality of the system.

In fact, I constantly read that that's one of the huge benefits of open source - on an open source project, if you don't like how something works, you can just step in and fix it, while with COTS you don't have that ability.

Software engineering is software engineering, whether it's open source or closed source.  Having the ability to tweak code (or an automobile) doesn't automatically mean that the tweak will be higher quality than what it's replacing.  It's entirely possible that it either won't be better, or that the improvement won't really matter.  On the IMAP mailing list, I CONSTANTLY see people submitting patches to the U.W. IMAP server proposing tweaks to fix one thing or another (even though it’s the wrong mailing list, the patches still come in).  And Mark Crispin shoots them down all the time, because the person making the patch didn’t really understand the system – their patch might have fixed their problem and their configuration, but it either opened up a security hole, or broke some other configuration, etc.

Btw, the same thing holds true for system modifications.  Just because you can put a window into a hard disk doesn’t mean that the hard disk is going to work as well afterwards as it did before you took it apart.

Just like in the automotive world, simply because you CAN modify something, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea to modify it.