ZDNet UK: The joys and perils of open-source life

“In light of recent events on the tracing tools side of Linux,
some reflections came to mind which I would like to share with the
Linux community. It is my hope that my perspective and
experience as a maintainer of an open-source project called the
Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) and as a consultant in the open-source
field may be helpful to others in understanding how the open-source
movement is evolving.“

“I started developing the Linux Trace Toolkit in the beginning
of 1999 as part of my research at the Ecole Polytechnique de
Montreal (“Poly”). I had one purpose: to provide a way for users to
understand the dynamic behavior of a complex operating system — in
this case, Linux. From the start, I was convinced that numbers and
lists of items were insufficient to described such systems.
Instead, what was needed was a way to visually illustrate the
system’s behavior.”

“As the old adage says, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Many ideas came to mind, but right from the start the one that
seemed to make the most sense was a control-graph similar to the
one currently displayed by LTT. Hence, I started out with a very
clear idea of what I expected of this tool once it was
running.”

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