Re: What's the story with the "end of XP"?

Chris Hills wrote:
In article <46778b0f$0$8382$8404b019@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
What Chris is referring to, on the other hand, is safety-critical embedded systems. In that case it doesn't matter whether it is open or closed - you have no choice but to write good quality code. You have a lot of code reviews, so your code must stand up to scrutiny - your skills are as much on display as they are for an open source coder. It's a different world from the one CB is talking about.

I hope it's a different world to CB :-)

Also the tools I use, mainly closed source, are to the same high quality as the Sw we write.


*Some* of the tools will be of similar quality. But much of what you have around those tools, like the operating system on your desktop, is not. And there are few development tools, regardless of the price, that are written to the same high standards as safety-critical embedded systems - to do so would be an absurd waste of time and money. You don't require the same levels of testing, code reviews, and quality control for your IDE as you do for the aeroplane autopilot your are developing with it.

The problem is that I have seen some absolutely appalling FOSS and in one case it was being actively promoted by the FOSS Devotees over the commercial SW simply because it was FOSS for all the usual reasons...

There are times when being open source is an absolute requirement, and poor open source software is then infinitely better than wonderful closed source software. Picking the best tool for the job means weighting your requirements and the available software's features - if you need to have the source available and need to have a free license, then that's your choice for your requirements.

You get the source and can fix bugs, the other costs money etc It is that sort of religious bigotry that gets the FOSS crowd a bad name.


And this obsession with bad open source projects is just as much religious bigotry, and gives the anti-FOSS crowd a bad name.

On pure engineering grounds I thought the FOSS application unusable.

The other problem is the irrational hatred of any payware and the supposed incompetence of companies producing this "bug ridden" software. ... I can only assume the FOSS programmers don't actually work in the SW industry. Or are they suggesting that the FOSS they do in their spare time is of a higher standard than their paid work?


Please re-read your posts - your appear to have just as irrational a hatred and fear of FOSS as any FOSS fanatic has of closed source software. There are poorly written open source projects out there - no one will deny it. But there are also plenty of exceptionally well written open source projects around, and there are plenty of absolutely appalling closed source programs available too. That's the reality of the software world - just as you can write good and bad programs in any programming language, you can do it with any license and any software development model. If you think that all FOSS is produced by people in their spare time, and is of necessity of a lower standard than closed source software, then you've swallowed the FUD from the likes of MS with an apparently total lack of thought.

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