8 Mar
2001
8 Mar
'01
2 a.m.
On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, John Foust wrote:
I've often thought about what the rag-tag open
source community would
do if they had the Windows source - the whole kit and caboodle. I'd
guess that the entire Microsoft source base (counting apps, developer
tools, in-house tools, and all the DDK (device driver) tools, etc.)
are close to two orders of magnitude more code and data than the
average four-CD Linux distro. Frankly, I don't think they could
handle it. Does the open source community have the same number of
full-time man-hours available to a new task of this size? What about
writers and managers, not just counting programers?
C'mon, John. You're a programmer. But surely you must have forgotten
what it was like to be a young programmer tearing up code to bits late
into the night.
Programmers would descend upon MS code like locusts and just eat that shit
up. You wouldn't see change over night, but within a year (probably
less) reports would come out of people finding and fixing numerous
major bugs in all sorts of MS offerings, the first probably being the MS
kernel. Bugs that MS staff either wouldn't acknowledge were there or
probably didn't KNOW were there.
And who the hell needs managers to code anyway? Pfah!
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org