* Attila Kinali wrote:
Hoi Beat,
On Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:07:45 +0200 Beat Rubischon beat@0x1b.ch wrote:
The major advantage for OpenSource is the visibility of the code - no code monkey is able to hide 20 years old buggy crap when he needs to provide the sources. Believe me, this is a great motivation for a lot of coders out there ;-)
I've never seen 20y old code in any OSS project (ok, i've never bothered to look at such old projects), but i know more than one project that contains crap code that is 10y old and nobody dares to touch it, because nobody fully understands it. So that argument is pretty much void ;-)
Quite some files of BSD operating systems contain copyrights like the following:
* Copyright (c) 1988 University of Utah. * Copyright (c) 1982, 1990, 1993 * The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
26 years...
And yes, there can be bugs in old code, too. And yes, some of these bugs get fixed more than twenty years later...
Even more, when you pay licenses host or by CPU, which means today _per_core_, why should a commercial software supplier optimize their binaries? Even simple tasks like using a commercial compiler instead of gcc, which gives 10-100% additional performance, is often not done as the compiler costs $1000 extra - compare this with the several hundred thousends the scoftware company usually earns per year...
Anyone who has ever written more than a few lines of C code knows that gcc is crap... unfortunately, it's the best compiler out there. The comercial compilers usualy segfault at every second file of my favorite compiler testbench, commonly known as FFmpeg. Well, at least Intel did a good job of fixing most of their bugs, but it took them years. How long it will take sun to fix their compiler, which is even worse is anyones guess.
And i'm not yet talking about compiler that emit incorrect code.
Attila Kinali-- If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together. -- African proverb _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog