[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“There is a lot to be said for art, but there is still more to
be said for *craft*. The hard fact is that the important parts of
writing a good program are the boring parts — the “sexy” stuff is
usually less than 30% of the project. Unfortunately, Open Source
projects tend to stall when the “sexy” stuff is done. The
developers lose interest and move on to other “sexy” stuff. If you
consider the high-profile projects (Mozilla, AbiWord, Samba, etc.),
you discover that about 10% of the developers do 90% of the work —
in other words, all those legions of programmers do essentially
nothing for the project.”
“I’d like to see Open Source software submitted to some kind of
formal code-review and auditing process. Not only would it improve
the quality of the code, it would reduce the endless security
exploits that have deviled Unix code for three decades. OpenBSD
should be a model here — that OS has not had a remote root exploit
in more than two years! However, I doubt this will happen; there is
too much ego and testosterone floating around the Open Source
community to make such a thing work.”
“I believe in Open Source, but the promise of “better
software” isn’t materializing, despite all the noise to the
contrary. The *process* won’t do it; the *developers* have to do
it. We need to be engineers first and artists second.”