Comment by mistermann

13 years ago

> It is shareholder value.

But in what timeframe? The article seems to imply they are thinking only about short term value and ignoring medium and long term.

7 comments

mistermann

Reply
brudgers  13 years ago

The article implies that line kernel workers interested in optimization for the sake of optimization are ideally situated to judge what matters in the long and medium term, and that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, despite being the two largest share-holders and more than three decades of experience running a software company (apiece) are incompetent to recognize long and medium term strategies.

The fundamental assumption of the article - that the Windows kernel should strive toward the Linux kernel management model is patently absurd.

FOSS is free as in "free to break software that depends on your code."

  • xyzzy123  13 years ago

    > FOSS is free as in "free to break software that depends on your code."

    I think this is a little unfair; the specific example is the Linux kernel where enormous emphasis is placed on never breaking userland.

  • quandrum  13 years ago

    I'm not sure he's arguing the individuals are making better decisions, but rather the sum of thousand developers making decisions is better than the shareholders the C levels at Microsoft.

    I think a good analogy is centralized government economies vs private enterprise economies. The less people you have making key decisions and the more isolated you are from the effects of bad decisions, the easier it is to evolve and improve.

    Obviously open source has a lot of failures and took a long time to catch up in certain areas. But things like the Linux kernel have become a massive, unstoppable force that's evolving quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Microsoft simply can't compete with the hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of developers working on it.

  • quandrum  13 years ago

    I'm not sure he's arguing the individuals are making better decisions, but rather the sum of thousand developers making decisions is better than the shareholders the C levels at Microsoft.

    I think a good analogy is centralized government economies vs private enterprise economies. The less people you have making key decisions and the more isolated you are from the effects of bad decisions, the easier it is to evolve and improve.

    Obviously open source has a lot of failures and took a long time to catch up in certain areas. But things like the Linux kernel have become a massive, unstoppable force that's evolving quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Microsoft simply can't compete with the hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of developers working on it.

  • quandrum  13 years ago

    I'm not sure he's arguing the individuals are making better decisions, but rather the sum of thousand developers making decisions is better than the shareholders the C levels at Microsoft.

    I think a good analogy is centralized government economies vs private enterprise economies. The less people you have making key decisions and the more isolated you are from the effects of bad decisions, the easier it is to evolve and improve.

    Obviously open source has a lot of failures and took a long time to catch up in certain areas. But things like the Linux kernel have become a massive, unstoppable force that's evolving quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Microsoft simply can't compete with the hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of developers working on it.