On Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 04:13:39AM +0000, codephantom via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:42:07 UTC, Bo wrote:
> > /Signed: A pissed off Windows user
>
> I think you've summed it all up right there ;-)
>
> But seriously, Windows rightly has its place... and for good reasons.
>
> Most importantly, it provided the ease of installation along with a
> easy to use and easy to understand GUI, that simply could not be
> provided by open source alternatives.
It's a matter of opinion. *I*, personally, find Windows atrociously
hard to do anything useful in. I get an aneurysm trying to click
through countless nested menus just to find that one button I need, when
I could have typed the right command in 3 seconds in a Bash shell. But
OTOH, I also know that my opinion is in the minority (by far!). :-P I
think it just boils down to personal preference and habit built from
past familiarity. As they say, there is no accounting for taste.
One thing is clear, though: claiming that Windows is "dead" is, frankly,
ridiculous. Even a non-Windows person like me who rarely has any reason
to notice things Windows-related, can see enough circumstantial evidence
around me that Windows is still very much alive and kicking. (Even if
in my ideal world there would be no Windows... but then, if the world
were my ideal, 90% of computer users out there would probably be very
angry about being forced to use obscure text-only interfaces that I'm
completely comfortable in. So it's probably not a bad thing the real
world doesn't match my ideal one. :-D)
[...]
> But software is for the user, not the vendor. A user should be able to
> adapt software to meet their own requirements. Closed source prevents
> that.
>
> I think open-source really is the future, and Windows will fade into
> obscurity - but only if open source continues to deliver the benefits
> that Windows has always been able to deliver. If that keeps occuring,
> then there is little justification for having a closed source
> operating system - whether you call it Windows or whatever.
>
> And I think trust will become a bigger issue in the near future
> too...i.e. how can you trust code you can't view? You can barely even
> trust code you can view ;-)
[...]
There is another side to this argument, though. How many times have
*you* reviewed the source code of the software that you use on a daily
basis? Do you really *trust* the code that you theoretically *can*
review, but haven't actually reviewed? Do you trust the code just
because some random strangers on the internet say they've reviewed it
and it looks OK?
It is a common argument among open source proponents that having more
eyes will reduce the number of bugs... It sounds convincing, but the
problem with that, is that this only works when there is a relatively
small amount of code and a very large pool of potential reviewers.
Unfortunately, the hard reality today is that there is so much open
source code out there, and the rate at which open source code is being
written far exceeds the rate of growth of the number of open source
reviewers, that I'd venture to say 80-90% of open source code out there
has never seen more than a very small number of reviewers. Probably not
more than 1 or 2 for a significant fraction of it, if even that. I have
seen open source code that probably has *never* been reviewed, because
any review would have instantly brought to light the blatantly-obvious
bugs and problems that riddle just about every page of code. And some
of that code is so ugly that even if I had personally reviewed it to
death, I still wouldn't trust anything that depends on it, sorry to say.
And among the scant few projects that do get above average contributors
(and thus code reviewers), we *still* have bugs like Heartbleed that go
undetected for *years*. And this is in cryptographic code that,
ostensibly, undergoes far more careful scrutiny than more "ordinary"
code. Where does that leave the trust level of said ordinary code?
Especially code that comes from lesser projects that don't enjoy the
same level of review as high-visibility projects like OpenSSL?
That's not to say that proprietary code is any better, though. Having
worked in proprietary software development ("enterprise" software
development) for the past 2 decades or so, I can say that the code
quality isn't any better. Just because you pay somebody to do the job
doesn't guarantee they'll do a *good* job, let's just put it that way.
There's a widespread mentality of "not my problem" that goes around in
proprietary software development. You don't want to touch some ugly
code that isn't directly your responsibility, because it could break and
the blame would fall on you. You often don't know why something was
written a certain way -- it could be part of an elaborate bugfix for a
critical customer bug, so you really don't want to touch it and break
things. So you just work around it in the code you *are* responsible
for, and let whoever it is figure out what to do with *their* code.
Unfortunately, often this "whoever" is actually "nobody", because said
persons have moved on. So things end up never getting fixed. Also,
sometimes bad designs are left untouched because of office politics, and
code quality can greatly suffer because of that.
At least with open source code disinterested 3rd parties can review the
code without undue bias and notice problems (and ostensibly, fix them).
But let's not kid ourselves that open source is *necessarily* better.
It *can* be better in some cases, but it depends. Trust is a far more
complex issue than "proprietary is bad, open source is good", as certain
open source zealots would have us believe. It takes more than just
being open source; other factors also play a critical role, so just
because something is open source guarantees nothing.
T
--
Life would be easier if I had the source code. -- YHL
