On Saturday 14 December 2002 01:00 pm, you wrote:
> Not expressing any constructive opinion, your paragraph here is just saying
> that BSD guys are more professional.
That depends on your definition of "professional". If professional is careful
up to the point of stagnation then professional is a dirty word. I'm not
saying that BSD is stagnating. What I am saying is that there is a never
ending conflict in the software business between letting new ideas in and
keeping with the old in favour of stability and security. MS could be said,
by your definition, to be very professional since they are very careful not
to break backward compatibility (it is true that they have broken it several
times but in the course of 20 years they have done it much less than others
in the expicit aim of keeping their user base.). Is this type of behaviour
professional ? I think not. They have hurt their users with this backward
compatibility a lot more. When you're designing an OS you need to be able to
experiment with different subsystem designs. If you don't experminent you
can't understand where you want to go. If you are too careful about security
your release rate of new concepts goes down drastically since you never
release anything until it is audited. This means that your experimentation
rate goes down drastically and so does your understanding of what design
you'd rather have in the future. This hurts your users in the long run but
keeps them happy in the short. "professional" is such a murky word...:)
cheers,
Mark
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