23 Sep
2022
23 Sep
'22
12:44 a.m.
On Sep 22, 2022, at 10:44 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 3:08 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
Any sufficiently complicated technology is indistinguishable
from magic! (apologies for mangling Clarke's Third Law)
On Thursday, September 22, 2022, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Indeed. Ted has made this point frequently; Linux for example
basically requires corporate sponsors to get new features into
the kernel. Sure, some individual might come up with a great
idea and implementation that'll make it in, but that's the exception
rather than the norm.
The flip side is that there's a lot of load-bearing infrastructure
that is barely maintained, if at all. This xkcd seems perennially
relevant: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I suppose the situation may be summed up as extremes at both
ends. In any event, it's not great. On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 5:50 PM Phil Budne
<phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote:
That reminds me of the excellent dissertation of Gerald Holzmann on Code Inflation[1].
The situation is even worse now and honestly I don't see it will improve in the
future. My take on the code inflation problem is that today without paid
"volunteers" (from IBM, Oracle, Google, etc.) a large chunk of our modern
software landscape would just collapse. It is not 90s Internet anymore where hobbyists
did it for fun, because frankly back then it was fun... Nowadays... not that much. Not to excuse the failure of the BSD team to
properly attribute source
origin by adding only their copyright notice, but didn't AT&T try
unfair turnabout by not properly attributing the origins of their
TCP/IP code?
One of my favorite copyright notices was for /bin/true in System V.
An empty file got turned into 7 lines of comments holding copyright
boilerplate and an `#ident` line with an SCCS version number:
progress!