After completing the short “OSS” blog series series and before returning to the “Simplify!” blog series that grew quite a lot while writing, I would like to discuss a completely different topic. I call it “the two first laws of architectural work”.

In the previous post, I discussed the two most widespread misconceptions about OSS, that OSS is for free and that it does not create any lock-in.

In the previous post, I discussed the rise of OSS, the positive effects it had and how it changed software development. At the end of the post I mentioned that also some misconceptions sneaked in. These I will discuss in this post.

When I started to discuss accidental complexity on the architectural level in my “Simplify!” blog series, I quickly realized that I needed to discuss Open Source Software (OSS) first as it often acts as a driver of accidental complexity on the architectural level today.

In the previous post, I mentioned the second law of program evolution that Lehman described in his paper Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution