Software Is Different

People have immense problems to understand (or vested interests to refuse) that software is different. Not from hardware, but from anything our societies have been dealing with in the past. Companies pretend to develop, market and sell software products, executives to 'manage' software projects, consultants to offer the same kind of services than they would to the military. CM is supposed to apply to software, which would yield SCM: what a joke!

All this is only marginally relevant.

Software is essentially different because it is copyable at no cost, with no effort, a consequence of which is that nothing which exists has any value: the value is at the surface of, not inside, the software.
As a result, software evolves (as life) by small increments, which it is paramount to sediment, and thus to manage. Such small increments may arise virtually from everywhere, come from everybody. Obvious there, is that these contributions are not a priori consistent with each other. They do not build upon a universal reality and this is what makes software a postmodern phenomenon. Reality is made of perceptions, and it is often irrelevant whether these perceptions make sense or not: they are typically self-fulfilling, at least within a community.

This should immensely raise the importance of SCM, the knowledge needed to expand this surface. Obviously it has not yet, which shows up in the inertia with which the development in software lags behind this in hardware.

I wrote that software is different, but paradoxically, this doesn't work symmetrically: every other human activity can be managed as, or through (with the help of) software. So that once SCM will have been invented, no CM will be needed anymore.

-- MarcGirod - 09 Nov 2007