Technology
The sub-goals of programmers working on a shared artifact "can be deferred to the degree that they become what is known amongst professional programmers as an 'S.E.P.' - somebody else's problem." This can be considered an aspect of social loafing where, in some instances, while working as a team individuals become less productive because they feel less responsible for the final product.
Unix became popular because when it was developed at Bell Labs where "profits were somebody else's problem," so there was no reason not to share the source code with universities. This means that Bell Labs were not concerned with making Unix a profitable computer operating system and thus in turn making it conveniently accessible to university campuses.
Read more about this topic: Somebody Else's Problem
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)