[Info-vax] C99 stuff (Re: The Road to V9.0)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/9/2019 8:57 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 6/9/2019 8:44 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> closed source works like:
>>>
>>> vendor produce product X
>>>    customer A use X as is
>>
>> Customer A adds feature to X, gives it to vendor, vendor incorporates it.
>> Or customer asks vendor for feature and vendor incorporates it.
>>
>>> open source works like:
>>>
>>> vendor produce product X
>>>    customer A use X as is
>>>    customer B hack X to become Y
>>>
>>> A does not care about what B does.
>>
>> Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way, because if customer B's 
>> hack
>> gets accepted by a majority of the community it becomes canon.  And 
>> now if
>> you want support from other users, you have to be running the version Y
>> with that hack because that's what everyone else is running.
> 
> That could happen.
> 
> But that does not meet the criteria that I commented on:
> 
> "you'll be the sole tester of the code, instead of code that is checked 
> and tested by many."
> 
> Going from closed source to this particular open source case mean that
> that instead of getting updates tested by vendor then you get updates
> tested by B, vendor and all the other customers that tested it before
> the vendor took it.
> 
> That sounds like a a factor 2-100 increase in testing of the stuff you
> receive. Pretty good IMHO.
> 
>> This can be a good thing because it promotes rapid advancement but it can
>> also promote rapid change for no reason.  It's a good thing in a field 
>> that
>> is rapidly evolving, it is a terrible thing for a commercial OS.
> 
> I don't see that.
> 
>>> Besides that then very few open source customers actually hack the
>>> code.
>>>
>>> My guess is that it is less than 1 per 10000 Redhat customers that do 
>>> so.
>>
>> It only takes one.
> 
> If you don't take their change then it does not impact you.
> 
> If the change get back to vendor then it is tested by author customer +
> vendor + N other vendors instead of just vendor.

It is also worth noting that commercial OS implies that
some part of the OS is not open source - it does not imply
that there is no open source in the OS.

I would expect any general purpose commercial OS
to include huge amounts of open source today.

If VSI started counting then I think they will find quite
a bit for VMS as well.

Obviously all the application support stuff: Apache,
XML libs, Java etc..

LLVM for compilers.

I strongly suspect that the new password hashing will
be based on open source code not a clean room implementation
of the algorithm.

Etc..

And whatever changes these projects get from customers
will end up in VMS whenever VSI feels confident to take a
new version.

Even though VMS is closed source.

But I don't see that as a problem. This stuff will be pretty
well tested.

Some customer tested it. Some other customers tested it. Official
project tested it. And VSI tested it.

Arne