Go loners go!
June 15th, 2006 by Ivo
I just read Clay's rather opinionated post about Loner applications.
I posted my reply in his blog, but since the submitbutton didn't seem to work and my reply was rather lengthy anyway (which might very well be the reason it didn't work), I decided to post it here instead.
When I read Clay's post, at first I thought 'hear hear!' and completely agreed.
But then I changed my mind.
The fact that Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa never stopped others from painting similar paintings. Neither should Coldplay and Keane not exist because U2 already makes the best music in the world anyway.
There are many reasons why people program. The most common reason of all is 'fun'. I've heard tens of times 'I know there already exist standard apps for this, but I just wanted to learn how it works, and it was fun'.
And this is every free programmers right.
None of these programmers force you to install their apps. They just show the world what they have created. And people either like it and install it, or they don't.
One example: had Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought 'why built a search engine, we already have altavista, lycos and metacrawler', they would never have turned the search engine market upside down.
Just not developing anything new because 'it already exists' is simply killing innovation. Every now and then a new app WILL succeed in being better. 9 out of 10 won't, but it's that 1 in 10 that makes all the other efforts worth our while.
So please, develop all you want. Be creative. But use common sense. Reuse what you can reuse. Think about extending existing apps instead of beginning from scratch. And I do agree with Clay that interoperability is important if you want others to use your software. But we do n't pay you to develop this, so it's really nothing more than an advice. And if you code just for fun, do whatever you like. It's your own spare time. Who are we to judge what you should and should not create?