Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
 > I say "somewhat unrealistic" because reuse of software components is a
 > hard management problem.

Not really.  It's a hard payment problem -- transaction costs kill
you.  If you eschew payments, and you have a good software
characterization system (well, okay, so call that your hard management
problem if you want, but CPAN does pretty well), you can reuse a lot
of software.

I'll take a leap of faith, and further assert that scripting languages 
get more reuse than do compiled languages.

 > The theory for free software is obvious: some extra reuse[1] will
 > be generated by the very fact the source is open to random
 > developers, but I see no evidence that in practice free software
 > will result in the desirable levels of resources being devoted to
 > reuse.  It seems more likely that most people will hang out,
 > waiting for the libraries to magically appear, and when they really
 > really need it, they'll either buy or build the minimum they need,
 > and not put huge amounts of resources into further reusability not
 > of direct benefit to themselves and their customers.

http://www.cpan.org.  No, really.

-- 
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