Cringley on Microsoft and Linux

brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."

Comments

Opinion: Ballmer's Slip

[Anonymous Coward]

Read a similar article at OSNews today: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4898

Re:from "Nothing new here" department

[aheath]

Cringley may have nothing new to say to the technical audience that reads Slashdot. However, Cringley is clearly addressing a non-technical audience. Cringley does a nice job of explaining why Microsoft does not understand the open source model. Cringley also does a nice of job of pointing out that software development may meet business goals without necessarily meeting quality goals.

Cringley's article is a good non-technical explanation of why freely developed and freely distributed open source software can and often does work better than Microsoft's commercially developed and commercially distributed closed source software.

Cringely has a good perspective on MS.

[Anonymous Coward]

"When Ballmer talks about rears being on the line, what really counts at Microsoft is meeting shipping targets -- meeting business goals -- not quality targets. It is all about revenue. And there is nothing wrong with that if we all just say it out loud and admit the truth. But we don't."

He's right, Microsoft frequently gives away "Ship IT!" awards to managers who get the product out the door on time. This is the reason so many products that could have been great, are not.

Re:Forgotten Element in Commercial and Open Source

[MourningBlade]

PostgreSQL is quite heavily tested. Their regression test suite is...formidable.

gcc is, if I recall, has a regression test suite which grows by leaps and bounds with every release. Not sure what sort of coverage we're looking at right now.

perl 5.8 also has a large test suite, and 5.10 is looking to be insane in the testing department.

All of the core CPAN modules have at least rudimentary testing, most of them have quite heavy testing.

parrot loves it some testing as well.

OSDL wrote a test suite for the Linux kernel which is pretty hard-core, I've been told. Testing results for development kernels are posted regularly to LKML, I believe.

These are scattered projects (and they are not the only projects out there that test), but they reflect, in my opinion, a growing trend in open source: automated testing.

The reason for this is twofold, IMO.

1. Developers don't like fixing the same bug twice. If you write a test, you're unlikely to let that particular bug slip back in quietly (if you're good at writing tests, you can do a lot better than that in many cases). Also, automated testing + versioned source repository + automated tools = you know what patch broke what. That scratches a major itch.
2. Some developers are just wired that way, or are paid to be that way. So, when a project comes or is brought to their attention, they try to do automated testing.

As a possible argument against what I'm saying, I'll refer to your statement "no real testing of Open Source. No Test Plans, no Test Matrices of test cases"[1].

To that argument I would say: don't get so hung up on names that you miss the point.

[1] - I'm not saying you are making or would make this argument, just trying to think of possible responses and responses to those responses.

Re:Well said

[EverDense]

The Great Great Grandparent wrote: "I liked the part where he describes how most bad open source projects die in a darwinistic fashion while most bad microsoft projects limp on forever."

Then you write:
Actually, what you discribe is actually a bit of a credit for MS.
Windows 1..., MS C++, DOS, Notepad etc all started off pretty bad, but it was their persistance that made it all work.
MS has the luxury of releasing something that doesn't quite work properly and just working at it till it has it right.

Do you know how to COMPREHEND what you read?

Microsoft put out crap products and they should be congratulated for their persistence?

You're a complete twonk.

Re:The real reason why Linux is better than Window

[jcr]

To be precise...

Mac OS X uses a kernel derived from Mach 3, but all that that code does is allocate RAM and processor time. Most of the kernel code in Darwin comes from various BSDs, including the IP stack, a lot of the file system code, the process model, etc.

If you want to see exactly what does what, and where it all came from, check out the darwin code at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

-jcr