Cox on Torvalds and Linux Kernel Development

sebFlyte writes "Alan Cox' speech at FOSDEM sounds like it was interesting... according to this ZDNet report on it he has some interesting views. For one, he says: 'Linus is a good developer, but is a terrible engineer.' He also has a few digs at Torvald's methods surrounding security fixes, and some other interesting insights in the kernel development process: 'Sometimes you see a fix and think "this is perfect, move my fix into the kernel tree." Later you think, "I must have been drunk. Don't apply that patch."'"

Comments

Bottom line

[vivekg]

No one is perfect!!!

Fosdem ?

[hennar]

Free and Open Source European DEveloppers Meeting www.fosdem.org

Re:compliment is ying [sic] and yang

[WaltFrench]

Makes you wonder whether the Slashdotters above were actually playing MineSweeper when the details of "two's complement arithmetic" (aka, "subtraction") was covered, and were also sleeping thru their HS Geometry when complements of angles were discussed.

It's long been obvious that the typical slashdot flamethhrower only nominally has English as a first language. Now, it seems he's rather fuzzy about concepts in math, computing and systems, too.

Hard to imagine somebody who's too asleep to contemplate that "compliment" really means "complement" is somebody who groks the differences between by-ref and by-value, or any of the other zillion details that matter in our "profession."