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

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1074)	9/8/1999 5:07:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1794

Perhaps the central committee that controls Open Source development has rules in place to prevent this. ROFL! Perhaps the "central committee" that controls friendships among humans has rules to prevent bickering and fighting. I think you should perhaps join a development effort prior to forming any opinions on the subject. It is obvious that you have many misperceptions. Here is a starting hint... There is no central committee and there are no rules. Open Source development happens when at least two or more people get together to develop a piece of software without placing a restrictive license on it that prevents others from using, modifying, or redistributing that software. This license, as well as the (potential) usefulness of the code in question is what attracts even more developers to work on it. The better licenses have clauses the explicitly prevent the forking and hiding of code that you predict as a possible pitfall. Because the merits of the code in question is the main factor that decides whether other developers will contribute to it, the best code usually flourishes, while bad code falls by the roadside. It is a self-governing system that needs no central committee. You might as well talk about the central committee that controls evolution. :)

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1074)	9/9/1999 6:19:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

You've made repeated statements about hte large beaurocratic overhead necessary for open source development. The reality, though, is that these speculations are not born out by experience. An example is that Linus can manage kernel development in his spare time (while working a full time job doing other stuff) in part because there's others dealing with lower level issues. The StrongArm port of Linux, for instance, is managed by a guy named Russell King. When he has a set of changes for the kernel, after they've been tested (and evaluated by all the people doing Strong Arm linux development) he passes them on to Linus who integrates them and viola' next release they are there. This works very efficiently and quickly. If they don't pass linus's muster, then Russel could go off and do his own kernel, but more likely, he'll make the requested changes and resubmit them. The impact is pretty minimal because both are working off of the same code base and only collating deltas for particular architectures (in this case). Compared to my experience at microsoft- where there were a lot of beaurocrats with no understanding of code who had their hands in the pie- there is none of htat with Linux. In fact, its quite the opposite- part of the reason Microsoft is so glacial is not just that htey have much fewer developers, but for every developer, they have a program manager to slow them down. Dragonfly