Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 13:14:50 -0500 From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@magpage.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Advocacy help for CS professor Message-ID: <20020322181450.GA21894@gsp.org> In-Reply-To: <F118QCIRDE2e0ghLGRI00009136@hotmail.com> References: <F118QCIRDE2e0ghLGRI00009136@hotmail.com>
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On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 11:41:47PM -0700, Charles Burns wrote: > I have a CD professor who has a masters in CS and EET from a top 50 > university yet is enveloped in the Microsoft way of life. Then he's a brainwashed idiot. > - Microsoft has money, therefore can buy the best programmers, therefore > has the best products. Wrong. 1. Microsoft doesn't pay its programmers particularly more or less than other companies. 2. There is no evidence that the average (or median, or peak) ability of MS's programmers is any different than the rest of the industry. 3. There is plenty of evidence that MS doesn't have nearly as large a programming staff as open-source projects. For example, the total number of people working on, oh, let's pick FreeBSD, vastly exceeds the total number of people employed by MS in any capacity whatsoever. 4. There is also plenty of evidence that peer review has great value. This is a long-standing practice in law, medicine, science, engineering and other fields. Open-source facilitates peer review. Closed-source does not. MS products are closed-source, therefore not subject to peer review. > - Microsoft is very successful, therefore has the best products [...] Wrong. Microsoft is very successful due to two things, neither of which have the slightest thing to do with programming: 1. Despicable, unethical business practices (too long to list here) 2. Absolute genius in their marketing department > - OSS programmers could not possibly be as good as Microsoft programmers, > because Microsoft sponsors such things as nat'l programming competitions > and hires the winners/hires the best of class from top universities, etc. I 1. Winners of contests are not necessarily the best programmers. 2. MS does not always hire the best-of-class. These people often have personal or professional objections to MS. (I have both: I do not use or support MS products as a matter of personal ethics and professional excelence.) 3. Even if MS *did* hire the best-of-class, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have hired the best system architects, programmers, debuggers, etc. Our field is replete with examples of people who never made it out of college -- or even INTO college -- but who have turned out to be excellent programmers. (One of the principle kernel architects for Sequent's ground-breaking MIMD Unix boxes in the 1980's left college before finishing his bachelor's degree.) > - He is using examples of MS products being superior to other Windows > products, examples in which he is right. Perhaps. But I consider this to be equivalent to pointing out that a broken arm is not quite as bad as a broken leg. Neither is to be sought after. > - He says Unix is fragmented, therefore cannot have a unified vision and > focus, and that this automatically makes it inferior to Windows which is > under one company with theoretically one vision and focus.(to own > everything :-) Wrong. He needs to read a text or two on the role of genetic diversity in facilitating rapid evolution and species survival. (Then again, someone this idiotic is probably not intellectually capable of understanding these concepts and applying them to operating systems. It's very tempting to just let him stick with his preferred monoculture and wait for an ecosystem event that takes it out.) You may wish to point this out to him -- though it sounds like he's far too brainwashed to grasp its significance. (This is an excerpt from something I wrote a couple of years ago.) Key Internet technologies developed by the Unix/Linux/Open source community, 1980-present: Usenet news, NNTP, HTML, HTTP, web browser, Kerberos, archie, AFS, CGI, perl, gopher, PHP, tcl/tk, Java, VRML, WAIS, IRC, PGP, NFS, SNMP, i, DNS, WAIS, PGP, LDAP, MIME, PNG, BIND and oh-by-the-way all the significant work done on TCP/IP for the last twenty years. Key Internet technologies developed by Microsoft, 1980-present: That's right. Nothing. Not one darn thing, in 20+ years. So much for "freedom to innovate". So much for the ridiculous notion that MS has much, if anything, in the way of technical ability. (Oh, I'm sure some of the individual people do; but it's kept from surfacing by the structure of the company and its products.) ---Rsk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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