Linux 2.4 Wins 4th Place ... in Vaporware

An anonymous reader says: "Linux kernel 2.4 got itself at the 4th position in Wired Vaporware 2000 contest! The top prize goes to ... (check the link out for yrself ;)" I have a hard time calling something Vapor that I've been running on 30 days uptime, but what do I know? I guess a "product" without a release date just isn't something comprehensible.

Comments

What about...

[Dirk Pitt]

that Echelon software everyone keeps talking about? Geeze, it's been in the news for a year, and it's still not at Best Buy...

;-)

Re:Vaporware? Not likely

[TheAncientHacker]

Actually, when Mark Ursino coined the phrase it meant products that existed only in their press releases. At the time a lot of companies would do the press release and possibly a mock up and show that to the press and at trade shows to get orders. They'd then take the money from those orders to pay for tha actual development while putting out announcements about the final version being delayed. So any product that is even in development isn't truly vaporware.

Half Right about 2.4

[oconnorcjo]

1) Vaporware USED to mean that it does not exist except as a pipe dream and Linux 2.4 is WAY beyond just a pipe dream... it really _will_ come out soon (and how many times has that been said!).
2) But if you are using their definition of vaporware as just software that was expected out by now, then the 2.4 kernel does earn a spot.

It is easy to second guess the actions of great men (Linus Torvalds and company) but far harder to be worthy of their respect. And yet I critisize anyway :)...

When Linus Torvalds blessed the beginning of the 2.3 developement cycle, he said he wanted MUCH SHORTER developement cycles with "9 months being about right". Nine months came and went and he started saying he expected to see it done by xx/xx/xxxx date while in the mean time, he kept accepting neat new features/rewrites to the kernel causing more delays.

Now if Linus had not talked publicly about "shorter developement cycles" and "hope to get it out before ... January... spring... summer... fall... december", then people would not be so hyped/disappointed.
If Linus had just said something to the press like this:

"I really don't know when to expect the next kernel out. We are perfectionist and when a new kernel is released, we want to be proud to have our names attached to it... We think that the 2.2 kernel is a very good kernel and we hope that for those few who could really use the new features in 2.3, that we can provide them as soon as we know how."

With variations of a response like that, people would never be able to claim 2.4 is late. Now on the mailing list, Linus's speaches about getting 2.3 ready ASAP, was/is resonable and any reporter who writes about stuff from the kernel mailing list should be lynched.

BTW: From reading LKML, I think the kernel developers have done an exceptional job with the 2.4 kernel and it is really something to look forward to.

These articles are bad

[Evan927]

I don't see this said anywhere else, so I'll throw my $0.02 in. It seems to me that articles like this make companies think that they should ship ASAP, instead of when the product is done. No, 2.4 isn't out yet. That's because it isn't done. And given that it's only 1 month after the PROJECTED release date, that's not too bad.

And Apple's OSX - they aren't done either. Tribes 2 is full of bugs, and it isn't done. I hope companies don't listen/read these. I'm happy to wait for a finished product. Release it when it's done, not when it's due.

Re:These articles are bad

[Salamander]

While it is indeed unreasonable to expect that products will ship exactly on announced dates, and that pressuring people to do so might result in the release of still-buggy code, I think there's room for more discipline than is in fact being exhibited by the Linux kernel gurus. Scheduling software projects is not totally a black art. People experienced in a particular kind of programming can often come up with remarkably good estimates of how long things will take, how much extra time to allow for bugs that fall out during testing, etc. Nobody's perfect, but it is entirely possible to come up with a date whose percentage probability of being met is in the high nineties.

Why doesn't this happen in Linux? Two reasons: optimism and lack of discipline. There's no significant penalty for missing a date in open source, so there's no incentive to be pessimistic. When people aren't afraid of the consequences for a date being wrong, they'll usually give you a "best guess" - 51% confidence - date. People who hold themselves to a higher standard of diligence might give you a 90% number, but the project as a whole invariably ends up delayed by the people who couldn't be bothered coming up with a solid number when the project started.

Lack of discipline bites us in several ways:

• There's no project plan to speak of. Features and patches get added even in the latest stages of development - something that should make any professionally-minded developer cringe. Nobody knows until it ships what Linux 2.x is actually going to be.
• There's practically no design phase to speak of, so people just plain don't know what they're getting into when they start a release, so of course they don't know how long it will take.
• There's no specific review process, rarely any serious unit tests, and never any regression tests. There's no decent bug-tracking system. Even well into a project, it's impossible to guess where we stand on the "bug curve".

All of this adds up to create an extremely unpredictable development environment. It's only because of hard work and raw talent that Linux kernel release dates aren't ten times more of a joke than Microsoft's have ever been. With talent and work and just a tiny bit of engineering discipline, we could do a hell of a lot better than we're doing wrt release dates.

The actual release isn't what makes it Vapor.

[dmorin]

It's the announcement in the first place. If you say a year in advance "It'll be out in December", then it's your own damn fault if you miss it. If you don't want people to yell at you and call you vapor for not living up to what you said, shut up about it. No matter how many godpoints Linus has, if he doesn't want to be held responsible for his predictions, then all he needs to do is stop making them.

Duane

Vaporware? Not likely

[Platinum Dragon]

Vaporware used to imply software that only existed in press releases and screenshots. No one outside of the company had seen actual running copies of the software in question.

By that standard, Linux 2.4.x and Mac OS X are certainly not vaporware. Even .NET could be considered non-vapor, if you consider Visual Studio.NET and the Whistler betas to be released products.

I mean, it's not like the 2.4 test kernels are hidden from the world, only mentioned in glowy press releases and described as the Second Coming of MS.

Wired: Will Troll For Hits

Discount

[pete-classic]

I heard that Linus said he is going to give a 5% discount for each day that 2.4 misses the December release date by.

Oh, wait . . .