Thursday 2 February 2006

WeWare?

Eric Sink has a great article “Yours, Mine and Ours” in which he discusses different types of software:

“I claim here that there are three categories of software:

  • MeWare:  The developer creates software.  The developer uses it.  Nobody else does.
  • ThemWare:  The developer creates software.  Other people use it.  The developer does not.
  • UsWare:  The developer creates software.  Other people use it.  The developer uses it too.”

Can I add WeWare to that list? I define it as MeWare but for your own development team. This gives it a slightly larger audience – requiring a touch more thought than MeWare in user interface and usability, but not really requiring the robustness or even completeness of true UsWare.

I spend a fair chunk of my time on WeWare – libraries for helping to complete a project rather than actually writing the code that solves the customer’s problem. Of course I do a lot of that too.

We’re still having trouble pushing Meteor Server over the chasm from WeWare to UsWare (from an application-development point of view, at least – there are plenty of installations where we wrote the application). We might have a couple of customers now, but it remains to be seen whether they’re able to run with it themselves.

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