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Open-Source Development 'Faster, Better, Cheaper'
David Hart writes "Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering --
Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the 'textbook' software engineering often used in corporate settings."
Please mod me (and parent) offtopic and/or redundant...
Press alt, print screen and b at the same time. Your oh so stable Linux will crash. It may be flamebait to the zealots, but it is also Informative and Insightful, so mod this accordingly.
If you press SysRQ+B, the kernel will send a reset instruction to the processor, effectively resetting your machine without syncing the fileystems, corrupting them.
Please do read the documentation before playing with the MagicSysRQ key.
Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with the topic (FLOSS development techniques)
Uh. This is a feature, not a bug. As far as I know, it's turned off in most if not all vendor-supplied kernels. It can be turned on when compiling the kernel. However, it can be pretty useful when debugging something that makes the possibility of lockups large.
By the way, it's more than just rebooting you can do this way. During a lockup, you can sync your disks (alt+print screen+s), unmount them (alt+print screen+u), and kill everything on the current virtual console (for example X) with (alt+print screen+k). This is useful when you are running with less than stable drivers, X11-setups etc, but I would not recommend it instead of trying to get to the bottom of the stability problem.
I would recommend it hands down to having to push the power button, though, it can actually help saving your data.
If it's active on your machine and you don't want it, you don't have to recompile the kernel. Just type sysctl -w kernel.sysrq=0 at the console to deactivate it right now, and put kernel.sysrq = 0 in your /etc/sysctl.conf so magic sysrq will be deactivated automaticly next time you boot.
"We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop" You're talking out of your arse, I, my brother, 2 sisters, and countless others use linux as a desktop system. i personally would much rather use a linux desktop than a windoze desktop that doesn't fully support my motherboard (GigaByte 7ZXE) and crashes every 30 minutes
...these aren't my real teeth.
Eric Raymond breaks this topic down in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and excellent read. the opensource model is proven. the number of successful real-world projects built on the model have been belabored enough. it is the metrics you follow to adapt your particular project to it that matter, and those ,ultimately, lie with you.
The 'scratch an itch' motivation of OSS can also motivate people, though not always to the levels that you'd expect. One project I am astounded has not gotten more help is vb2Py. Vb2Py converts Visual Basic applications into Python programs, meaning you can move your VB and Access users over to any platform Python supports -- and change out the database back end in the process. The main developer even has a web based converter to demo the program so you don't even have to set it up!
Vb2Py is something that has both geek apeal and corporate snaz, though the forums have petered out. I'd desperately like to get folks away from monolythic MS Access MDB files and toward a more reliable environment...yet, there is little real traffic on the well designed and well thought out web site. Why????
While I'm at it, also take a look at InstallBase, a very nice cross-platform GUI installation program. I'm using it now to automate a network and to slowly introduce OSS to the others on the contract.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Well, you said it!
There are a lot of area's that need software that programmers just don't give a damn about.
I'll just name one - EU (European Union Government) certiefied invoice management for national governments. Yes, invoices have to meet requirements before they are recognized by the EU, which in turn qualifies them for financial help by the EU.
In general the whole business back-end that needs to deal with all sorts of boring laws and government guidelines is an area so boring and specific that no open source programmer would care. But there's millions of euros to be made in that area so there are literally dozens of companies with hundres, if not more, employees that make a healthy (if not somewhat boring) living from making this kind of software.
+++ATH0
You are not arguing against open source being the end-all, you are simply stating that in some cases,
you need a corporation to "conduct large scale usability tests" or "interviewing end users".
Even so, that would also be wrong.
"large scale usability tests".
otherwise known as betas and pre-releases.
"interviewing end users"
a.k.a. irc, email. feedback.
Open Source makes sense when the product is mature and the consumer wants something that will work,
without any hidden crap in it.
This is factualy incorrect in so many ways. For one Ximian helps out with gnome. they are not the producers of gnome. They do on the other hand have their own gnome version (XD2)
Unlike KDE, Gnome is free Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations...
I think you got GPL and LGPL reversed. Also since novell has taken over ximian they have released many peices of code under Open Source licences, and provided many coders to gnome/mono causes.
As for fonts. it may be patent infringing (but what isnt these days) i dunno. but fonts have never looked so good these days in linux. Mac OSX has fonts a bit better, but windows is easily worse than current font setups in linux these days.
As for the multimedia framework gnome is moving over to the gstreamer framework which is actualy getting quite intresting as of late.... check it out.