[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[Marc Rochkind via TUHS]

You say about Linux: "It doesn’t import technologies wholesale. It
reinvents them from first principles."

Maybe that's true of the implementation, but the design is a copy. I'd say
that about GNU also. The design is the hard part, and that's what the UNIX
invention was. Remember that even Thompson and Ritchie implemented UNIX
twice.

Regarding that statement about eyeballs and shallow bugs, I don't think
there's much evidence to support it. (Very few, if any, principles of
software development have been subjected to scientific  study, unlike, say,
medicine or civil engineering.) With open source, bugs tend to be
discovered by users, who might also be developers. It's better for bugs to
be discovered by testers.

Marc Rochkind