Great messages, Hannu. Now, for a point of slight contention:
> > 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).
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."Received on Sun Feb 26 20:17:53 2006
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