Software's hall of shame

LAST WEEKEND one of our writers recommended a book about Unix and introduced it by quoting an essay likening Linux to a high-tech tank.

That analogy prompted the following email, and a further exchange:

"You must be kidding. A tank? More like an airplane in flight while still under construction —- and constant construction at that. Oh, and construction evolves on three planes in flight. They crash all the time, but they fix it and get up and fly again. Have you ever read kernel traffic?

Egads, man: you've been swimming in so much self-serving propaganda for so long you're actually starting to believe it. I like cheering the little guy (even if he's made of titanium)….but put on the reality spectacles, would you?"

Name, email address supplied

To which our writer replied:

"Thank you for writing. I don't think Neal Stephenson was kidding, but he might have taken some artistic license there. In his essay, he mentions that the GUI is a metaphor and anything involving metaphor is fair game.

Actually, Linux can be as rock solid or bleeding edge as you want. Want a bullet-proof server? Run Debian Stable and the thing will never crash. Enjoy kernel debugging? Run the latest development kernel right off the mirrors. Linux requires some sophistication to appreciate and use right partly because the development process is public. Imagine what kinds of emails flew internally at Microsoft when they were triaging over 50,000 bugs in WindowsXP. If you could see those, you'd never buy any Vole OS.

I am facing reality. It's a mass market that accepts whatever Microsoft churns out and happily pays for it again and again that's very deluded. Are you looking forward to buying Windows and Office _again_ next year?"

We're always glad to get letters from readers, and our writers reply to every one of them -- those that aren't abusive phlegms, that is. That's usually the size of our correspondence, but our reader replied back. It reads almost like a professional author's column, if decidedly informal in its choice of wording, so we're glad to share it with our readers:

"Potato is no more bulletproof than a wet paper bag. Don't kid yourself. Is it reliable and highly-available? There are degrees of 'solidness' but it's hubris to believe that these items are bulletproof-- it's the same sad mistake Oracle makes in its current marketing prattle.

"Every Linux distro is dependent on evolution and the ability of warm-hearted coders to enhance/evolve/fix the distro. There is some elegance in Linux; potato-heads seem to feel (with some justification) that their tree is red-hot, while others are doodly-squat.

"Today's infrastructure would seem to be a tradeoff between app development and astute use of hardware platforms. In the NOC, there are a huge variety of differing apps, in a quasi-centralized model. Same goes for web hotels, and other centralized data chewers.

"At the desktop are hapless users. They give a rat's ass about IP addressing, the comparative differences between IPV4 and IPV6, virtual memory cache efficiencies, and other trivia. From a technical perspective, Linux plays potentially in all spaces. So does Windows, and with luck, perhaps OS/X. I find which does what irrelevant when considering that these are tools towards ends. Some are expensive and crash easily, others less so.

"Linux is an accident. Even Linus believes this. Three years ago, we had a long drive together, where he sighed heavily. His worry at the time was the underlying egos that wanted to fork the 2.2/2.4 tree into various branches. Yes, Linux has roots going back to Kernigan and Ritchie -- and Minix. The eloquent wax polished on Linux by such sycophants as Eric Raymond and others make me ill. Certainly Microsoft has its own sycophants and lap dogs-- and makes products that are also bad by design.

"An initial premise of Linux development was that you'd join the crew: you were a programmer, hacker, coder, script language-addict, etc. You'd employ your time to 'do things right'. I cannot discount development work that's done in the spirit of cooperation and love of the art, and much work in Be, Linux, *BSD, etc. have been done in that spirit. Linux development and Stallman's concept of 'free' have done much to rattle the world, just as CP/M and UCSD-Pascal did in the late 1970's.

"That Linux can embarrass Microsoft is no great feat. Linux is a platform, like any other. Accidents of time and the availability of resources have made both leaders. If you take a step back, you'll note that in reality, both suck. Here's why:

"Both take the computing metaphor and approximate it based on microprocessor evolution, using components invented 30+ years ago. Not much is truly new. It's true that I don't have to use front-panel, binary program loading, paper tape, cassettes, or souped up AR-33 teletype machine to do program and data loads. It's Intel, Signetics, Zilog, and others that have dictated the platform for a long time. Not much has truly changed there, save the ability to network hardware together into meta-platforms.

"Linux as a platform is unique, but its code development is not. While there are 'solid' trees of the kernel out there, not a week goes by when a buffer overflow patch becomes present. There is no method of quality assurance for code development (beyond peer review by humans) to lint code of mistakes. This is true for both code camps, Linux, Microsoft, and third parties. It makes my mind reel that there aren't apps available that automatically check for device/API relationships that prevent something as simple as buffer overflows... it's mind numbing.

"Hardware makers believe that software sells their products, but they don't want to pay for driver development, or minimize the effort. Linux device drivers have blossomed in the past 30 months, but still lag behind. If you review kernel traffic, you'll find that more attention is paid to devices than any other part of the kernel, and you can see the frustrations abound.

"Both platforms are now enormously bloated. The amount of superfluous stuff in both is staggering. I wonder why they don't collapse under the weight. The industry somehow started to believe that more-is-better. They never stopped.

"Linux kernel design is state-of-the-art, and that art reminds me of many factions pulling in numerous directions. At the shell prompt are still a gaggle of un-coordinated GNU/BSD utilities revered for their starkness... coded for the days when booting a 32K kernel was mandatory. I wonder how many people genuflect when they use ifconfig.

"Microsoft's Registry is the root of all of their evil, but it's not the only problem by any means. Their business practices are known to be substandard, and driven largely by testosterone and profits. Neither ingredient is particularly useful at a bluescreen or Trojan infestation.

"I'm a critic of operating systems, their design, and their efficiencies. It's not that I don't have a respect for the evolution of the industry. But there are some basic premises that seem to have been ignored in the religious wars between Windows, and Unix-alike development efforts. While these two development efforts are the current main thrust of the industry, they are in and of themselves, laudable but not in any way holy.

"There seems to be a human need for defensibility of the choices that one makes, and in that defense, as Vonnegut might say, we tell ourselves sweet lies."

Name, email address supplied