People write spreadsheet templates, word processor macros, and custom shell scripts to backup project files. These programs tailor general purpose applications to meet specific user needs.
Small programs
Businessmen, engineers, and scientists write simulations to demonstrate or test specific theories, often in Visual Basic.
Animation scripts
Graphic artists write scripts that describe characters and envirnoments and how the characters move to produce the intended animation.
Configuration files
Configuration files blur the lines between programs and data, but many configuration files can be interpreted as programs. For example, email filters are sequenced lists of criteria and actions to take.
Evolution
Generally, the user-written software genre consists of small programs, that are designed to accomplish or test one thing. These simulations and scripts usually focus on the specific goals of the writer, and lack the polish and generality of commercial applications. User-written programs usually have a short life-span.
Occasionally, small user-written programs evolve into enormous applications. When user programs are generalized to meet the needs of many users, and get spit and polish, they evolve into self-standing applications. Some engineering and science simulations have grown to be millions of lines of code. Some personal business spreadsheets have grown into important corporate-wide applications. The World wide web began as a personal project to publish physics papers on the Internet, and grew to become the largest software project in the world. As user-written programs evolve and become more important, professional software engineers take over many development responsibilities.
Demographics
Estimates range from 2 to 25 times as many users who write software as there are professional programmers and software engineers.
Software which is expected to be of use to a large part of the CAEN user community is particularly desirable, since using a shared copy is a more efficient use of resources than using several private copies.
Since the worth of software to the user community is based users' ability to use it, software in /usr/contrib must be kept in a usable state in order to justify its existence on the system.
Ensuring that the software tree is periodically backed up so that restoration of files may be accomplished when needed is basic to this responsibility, as is ensuring that nothing happens to the disk space being used by the software or the permissions allowing the maintainer to make necessary changes or updates.
Computer software is so called in contrast to computer hardware, which encompasses the physical interconnections and devices required to store and execute (or run) the software.
Software may also be written in an assembly language, essentially, a mnemonic representation of a machine language using a natural language alphabet.
Software license gives the user the right to use the software in the licensed environment, some software comes with the license when purchased off the shelf, or OEM license when bundled with hardware.
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