Slashdot Mirror
Looking At The Linux Kernel
A reader writes: "Some folks from The Boston Consulting Group with OSDN have been working on creating a visual representation of the Linux Kernel. It's been put online, complete with instructions with how to read it, and how to make sense of the information." There's also some new code checked into the Free Code Graphing Project, which enabled this to project to come together (look at CVS)
- let's see if we can get people to do it with things like *BSD, Apache and some of the other great projects out there. This is a continuation with the other work being done, like the OSS demographic work.
(Note: Slashdot is part of
OSDN.)
Karim Lakhani, progenitor in many ways of the project also commented: "The kernelmap shows beautifully the inherent modularity of the Linux
Kernel. We think modularity of the source code is one of the important
strategic advantages that the Linux Community has and we wanted to move
beyond a magnifying glass on the kernel map poster to make it browsable
and to let the community add new features. We hope that this can become
a tool for navigating the kernel and learning more about how it works.
Rusty Russel and Martin Pool did an incredible job creating the map and
transforming it into html."
on a whiteboard. You know, the guys that love to draw rectangles and clouds and arrows and boxes sitting on top of other boxes and call it an "architecture."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There really is a penguin at the center of the kernel!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
For the last 10 years the "most expensive and complicated" option has been Microsoft, and that is what the consultants have pushed.
Why would BCG be involved in Linux???? There is no percentage in it for them - or is there? Help me understand here.
sPh
Congrats on the waste of money. Honestly, this is pretty and all, but hardly useful, and, most likely, not worth the money spent on the project.
What is the point of this? To sell it as posters and make a profit?
Who, in their right mind, would use this to change design, or track a bug?
This project is a waste of money that would be better off spent on the kernel itself, not a pretty picture of the kernel.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
We always called those Markitecture diagrams. They love it. Trust me.
I finally found something more overwhelming than HTML 4.01 (transitional) validation of Microsoft's website.
They're clearly trying to determine whether Open Source could be a more complicated and expensive option. They have to decide whether to start suggesting that companies hire open source hackers to write whatever the companies want. If you look at the demographic survey, they are clearly figuring out that open source hackers are frequently not employed, but could demand a lot of money if someone were going to hire them, and they have the experience to write really complex stuff.
A little less tongue-in-cheek: BCG could probably do well coming in, looking at what your problems are, and telling you which open source hackers you should pay to fix them. Then they can charge a percentage on the whole thing.
There's only a limited amount of money you can spend buying MicroSoft products. It's huge, but you can spend even more on open source if you pay the salaries of the hackers. I mean, they are projects with hundreds or even thousands of contributors. If you give them each $100k...
First a disclaimer: I've worked for the past three years at BCG. BCG's core business is not IT consulting (as IBM, for example) but business strategy. That means that our recommendations are usually not centered around any particular technology infrastructure, nor do we usually work with the IT department of our clients. Instead our recommendations focus on ways to increase the competitive advantage of our clients, some of the time that competitive advantage is reached through harnessing a new business model or a new way to organize around the work that needs to be done. Open Source is an active area of interest inside BCG mainly because it represents an innovative way to organize people to meet a goal. There has been an active mailing list discussing Open Source topics and how they apply to our clients needs for quite some time, also this is not the first collaboration of BCG with the movement, the results of a survey amongst sourceforge members conducted by BCG can be found here .