Bob Metcalfe On NPR

linux slacker writes "Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of ethernet, writer of a weekly columnn on Infoworld, was on Boston U's NPR show The Connection this morning. Among other topics, he predicted the eventual downfall Open Source and Linux, citing as one reason the old argument that "Open Source leads to security breaches". Now, this guy did support the Microsoft anti-trust case and opposes monopolies, but he just doesn't like the Open Source idea. " To be fair, he did talk about a lot of other stuff - it was a pretty good show.

Comments

Does open / closed have to equal good / bad?

[briggers]

Igor Stravinsky once said that there are only two types of music - good music and bad music. Perhaps its time that such a philosophy was applied to software. Software that is robustly designed and tested will always be preferable to software that isn't (obviously); but being 'open' or 'closed' doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. There are examples of 'good' closed software (ie on the space shuttle) and 'bad' closed software (You Know What).

It can be argued that open source increases the chances of a program being robust, but is not a panacea; at the end of the day it boils down to whether correct software engineering and testing principles have been applied. In many ways the open source movement is a backlash against appalling software quality in over-the-counter commercial applications - maybe it mightn't have been so popular if there had been more 'engineering' in software development from the outset?

-- briggers