On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
> Alan,
>
> Contract? What the hell is this? I have been observing what goes on
> here now for almost 18 months, and from my vantage point, it's clear
> that RedHat just sits at the mouth of each womb ready to devour every
> baby that is born like a pack of hungry, ravaging wolves. Everyone
> tries their best ot put on a happy face while they knife each other in
> the back and plot and scheme ways to rip each other off, and shaft each
> other in the Linux Community.
... Red Hat is no other that any other company, apart from that they
have a larger interest in it's field of business. They want to employ
the very best. This is quite natural; if they didn't, they would betray
their stockholder's trust.
No backstabbing is going on as far as I can tell. This far, the only
non-respectable company I've noticed in the Linux-business would be
Linux-One, which seems (to say the least) very rotten. But they are no
real part of the Linux-community anyway.
> This is why Linux will ***ALWAYS*** be inferior to Windows NT/2000. It
> can only be as good as the people who write it, and when they're second
> rate unix hackers, that's the ceiling on the quality level of the
> effort. Anyone who suggest any direction that's not understandble by
> you "gods" gets ignored, knifed, bad mouthed, or character assisinated,
> and if what's proposed is not undergrad unix computer science, you guys
> don't seem to understand it, or care (and you show a definite
> unwillingness to even try).
If you call people like Alan Cox, Alexander Viro, Peter Anvin, Linus
Torvalds, etc. second-rate Unix-hackers, you've proved that you are
definitely not in a position to have a company of your own. It's amasing
that your customers trust you.
I hope you don't mean what the letter of your mail says.
I don't know what suggestions you've come with that people haven't
accepted; as far as I can tell (and I try to read everything posted on
the lkml), people have been welcoming your move to port NWFS to Linux.
Linux is not Win 2K. I am thankful for that. I think most Linux-users
are. It might be easier for you to port NWFS if the VFS was rewritten to
be more similar to the one of Win 2K, but that would also mean that
we'd miss many other things we want.
> One good example is the VFS in Linux. EVERY release, you guys break
> something or there is MASSIVE file system corruption, or memory
> corruption, or some other catastrophe that takes days to sort out.
The VFS is NEVER rewritten during stable kernel-releases. If you use
unstable releases, you should be aware of the risk for corruption/
memory-corruption and other bad things.
Sure thing, it is not easy for a completely new file-system to go into
an unstable kernel, because it's a changing target, and this is why
new file-systems usually should be introduced in the beginning or
end of a cycle, where changes are to important subsystems.
> Commercial OS vendors never tolerate this lack of
> quality/compatibility. I'm sorry if you are offended, and i withdraw
> the allegations (man did I get your dander up -- jeeeeez), but we are
> spending money on developing on Linux, and the obvious lack of COURTESY,
> PROFESSIONALISM, and QUALITY increases support effort (I have to rewrite
> the VFS interface EVERYTIME you post a new kernel. You guys are
> constantly BREAKING stuff and LEAVING IT BROKEN and inflicting your
> laziness and bugs on the entire planet. If a Microsoft engineer (or
> Novell engineer) operated at this level of quality, they would have
> their work heavily scrutinized.
Commercial OS-vendors instead tolerate high levels of
performance-degrading misdesigns, instead of removing them, just for the
sake of keeping their VFS intact. Even more vital flaws are sometimes
left in because of this.
Courtesy? Is your e-mail a sign of courtesy? In the Linux-world we are
all measured by the quality of our code, not by our titles or the place
we work at.
Professionalism? Do you REALLY consider it professional to leave vital
flaws in an operating system just to please developers, developers that
have access to the source-code of the operating system and the possibility
to affect the development of it themselves?
Quality? And you mention Microsoft in the same e-mail? Allow me to
laugh... Muahahaha. I don't consider an operating-system where
beta-versions that are SOLD to the public eats your filesystem to be
of much Quality.
Breaking Stuff? Yes, that happens quite often. But virtually never during
a stable kernel-series. Breaking things during development is a necessity
to get an overall better product in the end. For instance, the breaking
of the VFS in v2.3 was necessary to get good SMP-performance.
Leaving it broken? This only happens with subsystems/drivers that have
no maintainer and with code that we know will change soon again anyway.
NTFS is broken (for all I know) in v2.3. And nobody has enough knowledge
to fix it properly. Your company has, yet you haven't made any effort in
that direction. Now why haven't you?! Because you haven't got time? Well,
maybe those you accuse of being lazy don't have time either? Ever thought
of that?
Inflicting bugs upon the entire planet?!! And you dare to say that
Microsoft doesn't? The only difference here, is that when Microsoft does
so, it takes 200 bug-reports and 12 months for a bug-fix to arrive, while
there usually are inofficial patches available withing a few days in the
Linux-case, and a completely new kernel within a month.
Now go figure what is better.
I'm still thinking that the port of NWFS to Linux is a good thing.
I do not think your totally unbalanced posts on this list is, however.
/David Weinehall
_ _
// David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /> Northern lights wander \\
// Project MCA Linux hacker // Dance across the winter sky //
\> http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ </ Full colour fire </
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 15 2000 - 21:00:13 EST