On the economics of software
Michael Wing · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2007
Source is not precious. One can go to code.google.com and download source by the gigabyte. That's a lot. It would take most people an entire career to read and appreciate a gigabyte of code. Reading one chapter of a book per hour or a 50,000 word novel in twelve hours corresponds to reading 1 billion characters in 20 years, at 40 hours per week. Wading through gigabytes of code to find the few lines that one cares about can take a long time. On the other hand, applications are valuable, because they do specific things for specific users. Working apps consist of specific bodies of source.