RE: [OT] an Amicus Curae to the Honorable Thomas Penfield Jackson

From: Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)
Date: Thu May 04 2000 - 20:06:31 EST


On Thu, 4 May 2000, James Sutherland wrote:

> On the contrary. Look at the issues with the NTFS driver now, for example:
> if the Windows [NT] source were available (with the restriction on patent
> usage) we could just read the source, and make the Linux driver work
> perfectly (well, as well as their version does, anyway :P)

BS. Different model, different kernel API, different code practices
to the degree that their code doesn't look like C. Besides, we _have_
free <RMS-bait excuse="sorry, couldn't resist"> as in _really_ free, BSDL
rather than GPL</RMS-bait> NTFS driver that works. For UNIX kernel, BTW.
And it helped us which way?

> Equally, the Wine project is hampered by the many undocumented API calls
> used - while you can have "undocumented" calls in an open source OS,
> there's nothing to stop you analysing the source code itself.
>
> Wine, Samba, the Linux kernel - there are plenty of open source projects
> which would benefit from this.

>From the pile of crappy code? Have you _ever_ read the code from project
that went hypercritical several years ago? As in, fixing the bug produces
more than one new bug... No?

BTW, what does it do on l-k?

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