Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On Dec 14, 2005, at 23:49, Al Boldi wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
There is a price you pay for having such a rigid scheme (it arguably has advantages too, those are mostly relevant in a closed source system though) is that it's a lot harder to implement improvements.

This is a common misconception. What is true is that a closed system is forced to implement a stable api by nature. In an OpenSource system you can just hack around, which may seem to speed your development cycle when in fact it inhibits it.

This is _not_ the way Linux works. We don't have a stable API _precisely_ so we don't have to "hack around" our API. When the API is broken, we fix the API, therefore it doesn't get "hacked around" nearly as much as a so-called "Stable API" would be. The development cycle is *accelerated* by the fact that an important API changes are _OK_.

Linux isn't so much designed as evolved, and in evolution, new dominant things emerge regularly. A stable API would prevent those from even coming into existing, let alone become dominant and implemented.

GNU/OpenSource is unguided by nature. A stable API contributes to a guided development that is scalable.

Wrong again. "Guided" implies that some overall authority controls everything that goes on, which is inherently unscalable. Look at how inefficient all the governments are! Look at how inefficient Linux kernel development was before BK and git! When Linus had to deal with the thousands of patches individually, that was the development bottleneck. As it is now, the merging work that Linus alone used to do is now divided up across a combination of Andrew Morton, Greg KH, and many valuable others (who can't all be listed without making this message overflow the mailing list limits).

Linux development scales _now_ better than any other software (open _OR_ closed) on the planet; recent patches from 2.6.X to 2.6.X+1-rc1 are 25MB in size and constantly growing. If you can come up with a development model that works as well and prove it in production, then good for you. I don't expect, however, to see any closed-source project come close to the rate of production of Linux; even _Microsoft_ couldn't afford as many man-hours on a single codebase for long.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
  -- Brian Kernighan


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux