21 Feb
2006
21 Feb
'06
11:02 a.m.
Great messages, Hannu. Now, for a point of slight contention:
I think that the merits of Linus' law are very much reality --- however,
achieving the right circumstances for the benefits to accrue is an
entirely different matter. If every project had the same ratio of man-
hours+talent to SLOC that the linux kernel does, then I think the
landscape of open source software would be very different.
Of course, such is not reality, and I doubt it ever will be. So, I
think direct comparisons of open source to proprietary reliability is
still a bit disingenuous. It really has to be done on a case by case
basis.
--
Pete Bessman
http://gazuga.net
"So this baby seal walks into a club."
and inevitable
legions of bugs unfixed because of all that deadweight a
commercial programmer must support.
The claim that proprietary software has more
bugs than open source one is
an urban legend. There is proprietary software that is full of bugs.
Equally well there is open source software that doesn't even compile. Some
software is just written by incompetent programmers. This has nothing to
do with the distribution policy. If there are any bugs then users report
them to the author of the program who fixes it (also with proprietary
software).