Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been called "negative coding."
Few people write small programs anymore. UNIX, the OS that runs the internet and on which the "cloud" depends, is a time-capsule full of small programs. What this might mean is left as an exercise for the reader.
Today, large programs are celebrated without question.
Gratuitous complexity can be disguised as "productivity" and pitched as value creation. At the very least it can be a source of fascination for futurists. Any liabilities created in the process can be easily explained away.
Among the many things that can be done with this output, one of them to is to make small programs from the larger ones. As far as I can tell, this is not being done.
For myself, I have taken large, open source programs and gutted all the needless features in order to produce the small programs I want.
My goal is less complexity. Simplicity is a loaded term. For myself, this process of incrementally reducing complexity "creates value". It is an intellectual exercise, there is a sense of productivity, and yet almost no code is written.
Software companies are full of developers who cut, paste and compile. Today many of them are working with open sourced code. The software company I aim to start is comprised of "programmers" who also work with such open sourced code, they only cut and compile.
EDIT: Whenever I see the "Who's hiring" thread I always wish I could put in an entry for this. The vision I have is a group of "early employees" with day jobs. Absent connections and name dropping no VC would ever fund this. No one will be paid to do this "negative coding" work until we secure our first government or Fortune 100 contract and they see the results. And even then I could not guarantee the results would be appropriately valued. But were this fictional company to succeed, those early employees could claim they were an integral part of a monumental paradigm shift.
EDIT 2: The fictional company does negative coding on single programs to reduce them in size or to break them up into smaller programs and is not limited to the embedded market or driven by resource constraints. Selecting parts of an open source OS distribution to create a new distribution is a different idea and of course many companies have been doing that for many years.
Few people write small programs anymore. UNIX, the OS that runs the internet and on which the "cloud" depends, is a time-capsule full of small programs. What this might mean is left as an exercise for the reader.
Today, large programs are celebrated without question.
Gratuitous complexity can be disguised as "productivity" and pitched as value creation. At the very least it can be a source of fascination for futurists. Any liabilities created in the process can be easily explained away.
Among the many things that can be done with this output, one of them to is to make small programs from the larger ones. As far as I can tell, this is not being done.
For myself, I have taken large, open source programs and gutted all the needless features in order to produce the small programs I want.
My goal is less complexity. Simplicity is a loaded term. For myself, this process of incrementally reducing complexity "creates value". It is an intellectual exercise, there is a sense of productivity, and yet almost no code is written.
Software companies are full of developers who cut, paste and compile. Today many of them are working with open sourced code. The software company I aim to start is comprised of "programmers" who also work with such open sourced code, they only cut and compile.
EDIT: Whenever I see the "Who's hiring" thread I always wish I could put in an entry for this. The vision I have is a group of "early employees" with day jobs. Absent connections and name dropping no VC would ever fund this. No one will be paid to do this "negative coding" work until we secure our first government or Fortune 100 contract and they see the results. And even then I could not guarantee the results would be appropriately valued. But were this fictional company to succeed, those early employees could claim they were an integral part of a monumental paradigm shift.
EDIT 2: The fictional company does negative coding on single programs to reduce them in size or to break them up into smaller programs and is not limited to the embedded market or driven by resource constraints. Selecting parts of an open source OS distribution to create a new distribution is a different idea and of course many companies have been doing that for many years.