Re: Pot-Smoking Quote of the Day (fwd)

Durandal@t-online.de
Tue, 29 Dec 1998 02:37:39 +0100


> From: "Mark H. Wood" <mwood@IUPUI.Edu>
> Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1998 15:01:26 -0500 (EST)
> Subject: Re: Pot-Smoking Quote of the Day (fwd)
>
> I think something that a lot of computer pundits haven't figured out yet
> is that what they see in the Open Source community is equivalent to being
> on all the executive mailing lists at Microsoft *plus* attending all the
> product engineering meetings. They might, however, have been clued in by
> that "build 1361" or whatever that pops up on the NT boot screen. Linux
> 2.2 has gone through one tenth the number of developmental versions that
> NT 4.0 did to reach release, not thirty times as many. Over a thousand
> attempts were so unsatisfactory that they never saw the light of day.

You are setting equal a high release frequency and bad quality.
I must say that I highly disagree on that issue. While it is certainly
good to keep stable releases down to a reasonable frequency, making sure that
they are in fact stable (MS did that (at least they didn't release often...
let's not talk about stability ... hehe)), for development OTOH it is
beneficial to follow the 'release early, release often' path. It keeps up
discussion and helps resolve problems. 10 lines of code are better than
1000 words. Also I would not say that Linux has gone through only a tenth
of development versions of the kernel. There are a lot more taking into
account all the guru patches (-ac*, etc.), bug-fixes by others, third
party additions that didn't find its way into the mainstream kernel.

> Ask yourselves, O pundits, what your chances would be of ever seeing Build
> 1 of Windows 2000 -- and what such a glimpse would be worth to you.
>
> Beats me why anybody trusts these people.
I don't, but for different reasons.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg Wilckens <durandal@t-online.de>
http://home.t-online.de/home/durandal
Quantum mechanics - the dream stuff is made of

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/