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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1037)	9/8/1999 1:43:00 PM
From: Pink Minion	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

By the way, Mshater - you wouldn't perhaps have a bias as indicated by your SI alias? I admit that I once worked for Microsoft - but not in their systems division. My hate is of a joking matter mostly, except when I'm reminded of some of their slimy tactics. Some people make Polish jokes, us geeks make Microsoft jokes. I'll admit I'm a Unix bigot, mainly because I like to get things done. We have always made fun of them, but now it is my development environment so I guess the joke's on me. The organization of the open software movement is the key to everything. Linus's true greatness is in his management ability. MH

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1037)	9/8/1999 2:55:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

Hi Eric, You raise some good points. But I think most of your arguments about the viability of the development model used for Linux can be refuted simply by looking at reality. It is unnecessary to prove that it works, because you can look at the existing base of software available that was developed in the manner and see that it does work. "Proof by inspection" is a wonderful thing. :) -Mitch

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1037)	9/8/1999 3:20:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1794

I would take a team of 400 Windows NT developers that work directly for me over a team of 100,000 Linux developers who work for no one any day. As someone who was a member of a 400 person team working on NT, all I can tell you is that you have to actually experience that to see what a nightmare it is. 400 people reporting to one person (Dave Cutler in the day) is an impossible project to manage- but a distributed, flexible OS doesn't require one person to oversee it all because each section, module, or application can be lead and developed, independantly. Interdependence in OSs leads to brittleness. Secondly, the 100,000 linux developers don't work "for no one". That's a myth. Most all of them are working on projects that are funded by somebody- usually a comapny that is going to make a profit from the project. The difference is that they take from the linux source tree to get their project done faster and they give back to the linux source tree so that their work will be integrated, and when they do the next release of the project, they won't have to re-implement their changes. I don't know if there are 100,000 developers working on linux right now, but there are millions of testers. Someone talked about the lack of testing, but the open source development process results in far more testing than the microsoft one. Just like at Microsoft there are development testers- people very close to the development who aren't doing development but are testing at a very low level the development work. These are usually people who are using the same code for some other development they are doing. And then the outer level, just like microsoft, is the beta people who need the newer code but are focusing on other areas of hte project. The big difference is the ratios. At microsoft, my team of 3 developers had 1 development tester working for us, and the beta cycle was over a year (actually a beta never happened because that version of the operating system called NT, which was developed from scratch to replace what y'all call NT, was thrown away when the current version of NT started to be bought by those who didn't hear their collegeues laughing... but I digress.) At microsoft the ratios look like this: 3 developers 1 development tester 12 month beta cycle to about 100,000 beta sites For Linux it looks more like this: 3 developers (same base) 13 development testers (and since they are senior developers they are much better at it than the junior programmers MS uses (who do a good job, by the way)) 3 month beta cycle to about 1,000,000 beta sites. Its clear which OS is going to be better tested, and therefore more robust, and this shows in the real world experience of those who have had to implement datacenters or net servers using those two OSs. Red Hat and others are funding development- an example is that Mandrake made a better installer- and that development gets folded in when the code is good. If it isn't good, people don't distribute it. Red Hat and Mandrake BOTH profit from each others work. Both fund developers for areas where there aren't volunteers, etc. This is why, as I see it, Linux cant loose. (and this is a radical change- about 18 months ago, I didn't think the model worked.) Linux is out Microsofting Microsoft. MS has cheated by giving away proprietary binaries to undermine the competition. Linux undermines microsoft the same way, but its ethical because the software isn't proprietary...and isn't used to get leverage and extort high prices. There will always be more developers of Linux than NT. There will always be higher quality developers of Linux than NT (because there's 20 years of experience with Unix out there and all the kids are learning Linux because its FREE and "cool" rather than NT which they can't geth their hands on.) There will be many companies that make money supporting Linux (to varying levels of profitability).... but once Linux is proven as a stable, robust, high performance OS (which it is if you look closely enough) there will be no business reason to go with NT. Dragonfly