<lamont@icopyright.com> said:
[...]
> It cuts the other way as well though. If it is prohibitively hard and
> difficult to get fixes out for bugs in the Linux kernel, then companies
> will tend to choose other operating systems to run their applications on.
So what? I have been running Linux from long before the craze started, and
I suspect I'll be doing so long after it dies down (if it does).
In any case, in Linux (and OS software in general) I find it is much easier
to get bugs fixed than with closed alternatives. The hard problem is to
find bugs to fix... there are so few ;-)
[...]
> I'm really kind of surprised that companies like SuSE, VA and RedHat
> haven't started talking about forking the kernel already. Those companies
> are serving the administrators and managers whose needs you are openly
> admitting that you are not concerned with. For those companies the
> present state of affairs isn't sustainable.
The people at the helm of those companies seem to think otherwise. And I
suspect they know a bit more about their respective states of affairs than
you do.
In a way they have forked the kernel (mildly) already, just look at the
patches they apply to the kernels they ship. But none of them can match the
manpower of the full kernel hacker community, so they know they have to
stay in synch with the official kernel in general terms.
> And I don't ask you to care about it. I guess my point is just that the
> linux kernel is an experiment in what happens when you ditch the managers
> and administrators and business-types and try to write a major software
> project entirely driven by developers. I will place a friendly wager that
> the experiment will show that not all the needs of those people are as
> dismissable as many software developers seem to think.
Linux is doing fine, thank you.
-- Horst von Brand vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl Casilla 9G, Vin~a del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 21:00:28 EST