Sunday, November 21, 2010

Some more thoughts on open source

Here's a quote from Keith Curtis' book "After the Software Wars".
"At Microsoft, we had it beaten into our heads to fix bugs: a bug meant an unhappy customer, and a bug that affected just 1% of users meant that there were millions of unhappy customers!  Software that doesn't work is not worth anything."
For anything open source, bugs may be an issue because no one has a proprietary interest in the product.  That's a strength of proprietary software ( or anything else of intellectual property origin ).  He goes on to point out the bugginess of Linux distributions and how necessary it is to address the bug issue with respect to the future of Linux.

Perhaps the thing to do is to nip it in the bud from the start. Nothing gets in the codebase until it is fully vetted.  It must get a seal of approval and that seal has to be earned.  No point in doing anything if it isn't right.  Better to start on the right foot than to end up on the wrong foot.

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