Great messages, Hannu. Now, for a point of slight contention: > > and inevitable legions of bugs unfixed because of all that deadweight a > > commercial programmer must support. > The claim that proprietary software has more bugs than open source one is > an urban legend. There is proprietary software that is full of bugs. > Equally well there is open source software that doesn't even compile. Some > software is just written by incompetent programmers. This has nothing to > do with the distribution policy. If there are any bugs then users report > them to the author of the program who fixes it (also with proprietary > software). I think that the merits of Linus' law are very much reality --- however, achieving the right circumstances for the benefits to accrue is an entirely different matter. If every project had the same ratio of man- hours+talent to SLOC that the linux kernel does, then I think the landscape of open source software would be very different. Of course, such is not reality, and I doubt it ever will be. So, I think direct comparisons of open source to proprietary reliability is still a bit disingenuous. It really has to be done on a case by case basis. -- Pete Bessman http://gazuga.net "So this baby seal walks into a club."
