[ale] More from Business Week

[Joe]

"Greg" <runman at speedfactory.net> writes:

> There is a reason for that and it is on the GNU website.  It is so that the
> closed source firms cannot use the benefits of the open source community and
> 1) not contribute anything back in  and 2) to give open source developers a
> level playing field when dealing with closed source.
> 
> Imagine if Bill Gates took a *nix and only worked on improving it and not
> putting anything back in.  That would give him and his minions a severe leg
> up on others.

I don't think it actually would. I think that *even if* Billy G turned
his vast resources to the betterment of *nix, the open source
community would *still* produce a far better product. Billy G has had
fifteen years to turn Windows into something not fit to be spit upon,
and look where it is today. I still have to reboot my XP machine
*daily* in order to prevent all sorts of bizarre problems.

Every line of code that gets into the Linux kernel is eyeballed by,
I'd say, a minimum of ten people, and those people are probably among
the absolute most knowledgeable people on the planet in their
specialties. There's no way you can reach that level of expertise
working in a closed-source shop, because *nobody ever sees your code*,
(and even if they do, they're just the other folks Billy G was able to
hire -- *not* necessarily [or even likely, IMO] the top experts in the
field) -- therefore you never get opinions from people more
knowledgeable than yourself. No closed-source shop can possibly
be as efficient a learning machine than the open source community.

Just a thought.

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka
<who's trying ONCE AGAIN to delouse the wife's Windows box and
get the &*#%@*^ network card to work again>
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