“Glitches cost billions of dollars and jeopardize human lives.
How can we kill the bugs?
June 10 of this year is a day the software industry would love
to forget. Auction site eBay (EBAY) suffered a 22-hour system
crash–the longest, but not last, in a series of crippling
software-related outages. The magnitude of the crash… stoked
concerns across the computer industry that software, in its
current form, may not be a match for the voracious demands of the
information economy.”
“In this [software hell], there are glimmers of hope. A movement
called ‘open source’ draws programmers together around the globe to
continuously debug major programs. The Internet provides a platform
for such collaboration and an instant feedback channel when things
go wrong.”
“Because buggy software is a global headache, engineers
around the world are mounting coordinated efforts to find
remedies. And some of the results show promise. Many
programmers are encouraged by the successes of the ‘open-source’
movement–a sprawling, global confederation of software
developers whose crowning achievement is the popular Linux
operating system. With thousands of programmers pooling their
skills to build and test such programs, bugs are discovered early
‘and the fixes are obvious to somebody,’ says open-source visionary
Eric Raymond. ‘Given enough eyeballs,’ he contends, ‘all bugs are
shallow.’ “