[Edit: added one of the biggest examples i forgot while drafting this: the JIRA dashboard.]

I’m not particularly fond of Linux. I’ve used it, and it’s good for many things, but as a professional system administrator I prefer Solaris, or FreeBSD, or even Mac OS X (as a UNIX). Why? A great many of the Linux enthusiasts I’ve had to deal with have suffered from what I call Shiny Object Development Syndrome (SODS).

SODS is characterized by a tendency to concentrate on developing new features that are pleasing and attractive to the developer, with a complete disregard to the usefulness, usability, or basic function of the product itself. It is particularly prevalent amongst open-source developers, particularly those who work on obscure Linux distributions.

Developers who suffer from SODS are often heard replying to legitimate user complaints with some variation on “you can fix it yourself if it’s important to you, the source code is available.”

Sometimes SODS infects an entire organization. When this happens to a company with paying clients, symptoms include: refusal to fix longstanding bugs; failure to supply updates to widely-deployed, stable versions when longstanding bugs are finally addressed; issuing updates that break existing functionality such as extensions, plug-ins, or settings.

Terminal company-wide SODS often reveals itself as intractable bugs pile up because the new shiny features beloved of the developers and the marketing department depend upon so much spaghetti code that it becomes impossible to fix all the problems without starting over from scratch. By this stage, the company usually begins to hemorrhage users as the cost of migrating to another platform becomes cheaper than dealing with the SODS-ridden status quo.

A good example of a company full of SODS is Atlassian.

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