While people and organizational knowledge are important, I have to disagree with the article. Code has value, tremendous value in fact. It’s the only record of truth of a software product. The code of a working product records the decisions, the designs, solved problems and solved mistakes during the development. Software development is not just writing the code. The code is the end product of the development process which can be long and arduous. Yes. It can be reproduced with skill, time and money, but it can be prohibitively expensive. Thus lays the value of the code.
Edit: case in point, Sybase created the SQL Server. During one of the due diligence of business partnerships with Microsoft, Microsoft “borrowed” a copy of the source code (not sure about the details). After much legal wrangling, Sybase was forced to license it to Microsoft due to the loss of leverage. Microsoft released it as MS SQL Server. It took years and years of work for Microsoft to finally replace the code piece by piece.
>The code of a working product records the decisions, the designs, solved problems and solved mistakes during the development.
Our experiences apparently differ. I've worked on dozens of large scale systems and due to the lack of up to date documentation and comments in the code the developers have had to re-engineer most of those details in order to make even minor changes as the requirements evolve over the years. The code might work, but the knowledge of how and why is generally lost to entropy.
Yes sure, the code might be unreadable but it’s the working copy that any changes based on and run against. Throwing it away and recreating the changes in vacuum would be very difficult.
Edit: case in point, Sybase created the SQL Server. During one of the due diligence of business partnerships with Microsoft, Microsoft “borrowed” a copy of the source code (not sure about the details). After much legal wrangling, Sybase was forced to license it to Microsoft due to the loss of leverage. Microsoft released it as MS SQL Server. It took years and years of work for Microsoft to finally replace the code piece by piece.