Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>> The boxes run stable apps over a stable OS and just don't crash. >Yeah, it's never ceased to amaze me how unstable M$-DO$/Windoze/MacOS are in >comparison to various Unix flavours. What is even more interesting is given >the massive number of people who -- in a more or less uncoordinated effort >-- are continuously developing Linux manage to get a platform that is >substantially more stable (though substantially more cryptic) than propriety >OSs. Ordinarily I would let this thread die, but because this subject is crucially important to me I have to point out that the novelist Neal Stephenson has a wonderful essay on this phenomenon called "In the Beginning was the Command Line", and you can get it at: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html I'm sorry the idea of free software being more stable than commercial software is counterintuitive, but it really makes sense if you take the time to think about it. Imagine if Mathematics worked the way the software industry did. Do you think that a single university could corner the market on mathematical techniques by keeping them as trade secrets and hiring only the best mathematicians? To me, it seems that the NSA might work this way, and who knows they might even be successful at it but we'll never really know... But in real life (academia, if you can call that real life) results are shared between researchers and the body of knowledge advances as a whole through peer review. Free software works very much along the same lines. Byron.