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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.
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.