On Monday 14 May 2007 11:44, James Knott wrote:
> ...
>
> > http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/05/making_se
> >nse_of.html
>
> The comment I like is:
>
> "Of course, the funniest thing in all this is the alleged violation
> of the "garbage in, garbage out" rule. Microsoft, whose software is
> notoriously buggy, believes that the open soure community has somehow
> stolen that buggy code...and made much less buggy products out of it:
It's not well reasoned, though, is it? First of all, the claim is that
patents were infringed upon, not that source code was stolen. Patents
describe concepts. Code is a reduction to practice. Bugs are introduced
in the reduction to practice, while they're not an aspect of the
essential concept.
If Microsoft's implementation of these putatively misappropriated
concepts is truly more bug-laden that those constituting the supposedly
infringing open-source code, it only indicates that the practitioners
at Microsoft (management included) are less skilled than those in the
open-source community. That, or the open-source development model does
yield better quality owing to wider analysis ("more eyeballs") and
better feedback, including solutions and improvements contributed from
outside the project's core development team. I'm inclined to believe
both are true, though probably it's more the latter than the
former--that is, open-source development intrinsically embodies the
potential to produce better quality results than does a closed process.
> ...
Randall Schulz
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