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Cringley on Microsoft and Linux

Posted by michael on from the a-week-without-cringley-is-like-a-week-without-sunshine dept.

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."

2 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Re:from "Nothing new here" department by aheath · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  2. Re:Forgotten Element in Commercial and Open Source by MourningBlade · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.