March 18th, 2004

The car with no user-serviceable parts inside

For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn’t even have a hood, so you can’t poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, “Hey, let me take a look at the engine of your car.” (I have a Toyota Prius.) On my previous car, the only time I opened the hood was to check the oil.

Sometimes the open-source folks ask, “Would you buy a car whose hood can’t be opened?” It looks like that a lot of people (including me) would respond, “Yes.”

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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