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Linux Software

Interview: Alan Cox Answers 175

Posted by Roblimo from the center-of-the-kernel-universe dept.
Monday we asked you to post questions for Alan Cox. We got so many good ones that only those moderated up to five were sent to him! Alan's answers are as great as you'd expect from one of the world's greatest kernel hackers. Read the full Q&A session below.

Phil-14 asks:
Do you think that non-x86 versions of Linux will forever remain on the periphery, or will Linux actually become a force for platform independence?

Alan Answers:
The focus of developers is always going to reflect the hardware people have. As non x86 machines become more prevalent the importance of the kernel port will do so. PowerPC for example has gone from being a fringe BeBox project to a major platform.

Embedded systems and palmtops are likely to increase the amount of non-x86 linux platforms. The price squeeze is also going to take its tool - there are simpler cheaper processors and in the end that pricing will begin to count big time.

Intel clearly see IA64 eventually replacing x86. It may be in time that the x86 port is viewed in the same way as the 680x0 port. It may also be that IA64 is a turkey, we all run AMD K7's and x86 lives on. Its a guessing game.

asad asks:
Do you see yourself still working on Linux 5 years from now? What about other people on the Kernel mailing list? And do you think the quality of the code people now write for Linux is still up to the standards of the old days ?

Alan Answers:
I have no idea what I will be doing in five years. Somehow I suspect it will involve Linux and Red Hat a great deal.

The code standards haven't changed much. Linus is very keen on having clean modular and maintainable code. We have ugly code in there, but its mostly in specific drivers and quite frequently coping with ugly hardware.

Linus is picky, but Linus always was picky. Linux is as good as it is because he is prepared to be a right pain about doing things properly.

aheitner asks:
Okay, there's not a Linux hacker on the face of the planet who wouldn't kill to have your job.

  • - Paid by RHADL.
  • - Wake up when you want, work when you want.
  • - Go to all the big trade shows.
  • - Work with the likes of Linus and all the other regulars.
  • - Get free toys (and I mean good toys) like PA-RISC systems from HP and Athlons from AMD.
But it wasn't always that way. Back before even RedHat paid you, back when you hacked on your aging spare equipment, what drew you to it? How did you know this was what you wanted to do before you knew about all the perqs involved, or that there would ever be perqs?

Alan Answers:
I'm actually paid by the support side of Red Hat not RHAD labs. That might sound strange but if you are selling high end support to people they want to know you have someone to fix the really bizarre, and you also need people who can. So in many ways I'm in support.

I did it because it was fun. I'd been doing other free(ish) software stuff like AberMUD before that. I got into Linux to have a better development platform for AberMUD then got side tracked somewhat into hacking the OS.

As for the toys. New toys are fun whether they are expensive or not. The important thing is new. So I had lots of cheaper strange devices I was hacking on before - like the Macintosh 68K port, and Linux 8086.

The advantage of working for Red Hat is much more time than money: So many toys so few hours.

Techno_Jesus asks:
I'm always concerned with redundancy and I think the linux kernel development could benifit from it the same way our servers can. If something were to happen to Linus (albeit very tragic) would you or someone else be able to take the weight that he bears for the kernel development process? I fear that the community is putting all it's eggs in one basket and perhaps you are the only viable replacement.

Alan Answers:
It used to be "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus" now its "What happens if Linus and Alan both get hit by busses". I guess someone like DaveM would take over (yes next years question is "What happens if Linus, Alan and DaveM get ...")

Kindjal asks:
How is the whole linux-on-sgi thing going? You were originally the guy behind that....what's your opinion on the sgi embracing linux stuff happening now?

Alan Answers:
I was hardly the guy behind it. Dave Miller did the original ground work while at SGI. Ralf Baechle did a lot of the other work along with Miguel de Icaza. Almost all the work I did was on fixing up userspace packages and building install and bootstrap tools.

The SGI I had is now in the hands of some other people who are still working on it. There is a lot of work within SGI on the new x86 machines and some work on the mips boxes. Check out oss.sgi.com

Amphigory asks:
I notice here that you were involved in the creation of the nano-x project at some point. What is your opinion on the continued viability of X-Windows? Should the open source community be focusing on developing something better, or is X the best we can hope for?

Alan Answers:
Ben Pfaff wrote a library for Debian called Bogl that did basic drawing but was very compact - ideal for non X boot disks. I had a copy of an old Minix library called mini-X and I stuck them together. Alex Holden and others then decided to actually clean it up and make it work usefully.

Its good enough to play minesweeper and probably doesn't need much work to be able to use it as say a Mozilla front end or to port gdk (and thus gtk/gnoem) to it.

For most things X11 is far superior. X is bad at some things - notably code size and handling fast 3D games. These are all getting fixed. X is a very flexible framework and there is little wrong with X itself as a system. XFree 4.0 should do a lot to polish up the implementation. Its rarely a good idea to throw out 15+ years of work because it has a few glitches. X is probably relevant to everything but small PDA devices or set top boxes. My interest in Nanogui is with the Psion5/Geofox Linux port where you have very tight storage constraints.

Borg[9 of 9] asks:
Alan, with the upcoming 2.4 kernel is there any work being done to address Linux tcpip performance issues? Is there any plans on making the IP stack multi-threaded and what about the stack spin lock issues on SMP machines?

Alan Answers:
DaveM, Alexey Kuznetsov and others have been working on this very hard. It is one reason the 2.3.x tcp/ip is currently a little wobbly. It is however all happening.

John Fulmer asks:
I'm a network security person and have always been intrigued by the concept of the 'hardened' BSD kernel (which isn't really THAT hard), and some of the role-based and compartmentalized systems out there.

What is the status of the security of Linux' overflows and root hacks) and what do you see as the overall direction, if any, of Linux's security beyond the standard UNIX security model?

Alan Answers:
Ok Linux 2.0 is absolutely traditional. Later 2.0 adds securelevel which gives a little more security at a usability price. Linux 2.2 uses capability sets so you can give processes finer grained rights. You can also revoke rights for all processes which can be useful in higher security environments.

There are people playing with role based models on Linux, although not in the mainstream kernel tree. There are also projects like Stackguard designed to catch buffer overflow attacks. Ultimately the only real way to improve security is careful auditing of packages. On the whole this works. Almost no packages that have been audited have future security holes logged against them. The Linux security audit project is the place to get involved with this. Anyone want to audit the perl interpreter ?

emil asks:
While I realize that you might not be completely objective about this question, what do you think of the design of the HURD, as it compares to Linux?

I once asked Linus himself this question and he replied in rather annoyed tones that "the HURD is a great academic design that would never work in practice" (or something along those lines).

Richard Stallman has been steadfast in refusing to endorse Linux as the GNU kernel. Does he raise these objections merely for emotional reasons, or does he see the HURD as having real technical advantages to the current monolithic design?

Alan Answers:
HURD is a great concept. Like most great concepts it isnt efficiently implementable I suspect. Hurd is a GNU vision and every project needs some lofty probably unachievable goal.

The HURD design is more about Richard Stallman's ideas about how a system should work to promote community than about high perfomance OS design. Linux is a bit more pragmatic about things. We took ideas from the microkernel world (like loadable device drivers) but we didn't take the accompanying partitioning and performance loss.

HURD is a rich flexible environment where the user has a lot of power to say "no I don't like that, I'll write my own code and use it" - even for things like filesystems. Right now HURD is a research project. Maybe one day it will become a useful OS.

Tekmage asks:
How has the multicultural and multilingual participation affected the development of Linux as a whole?

Have you begun to see evidence of third-world participation effecting the progress of Linux yet, or is it still in the "hope to see soon" category? What needs to be done/changed to assist in the cross-cultural adoption of Linux? (Unicode?)

When can we expect to see a Linux Universal Translator Engine? :-)

Alan Answers:
We have uf8 unicode support in the kernel for stuff like the console and file names. We have Japanese X11 fonts. Gnome and KDE have a lot of translations although mostly to left to right rendered Western european languages. Its a start.

What do you call third world ? Really its a gradation, and also a lot of it is based on perception. I get code and patches from countries as culturally varied as India, and Iran. There is a noticable amount of activity in Brazil, both with the kernel and other packages. The real third world countries don't really yet have the infrastructure to support the Linux development model. Linux helps to give them the tools to create that infrastructure and I am sure in time it will come when I get kernel patches from these countries too.

Developing countries are also in a good position to benefit from the opening of the market. It doesn't matter where I am on the globe providing I have part time connectivity, electricity and computers I can do Linux development work for companies anywhere in the world - this is one of the other great things about my job. If I wanted to move country there are almost no logistical barriers to doing that and continuing to work for Red Hat.

Actually promoting cross cultural adoption of Linux is hard. It has to come from people in those countries. Maybe I can get away with putting together a French language Linux distribution in the UK, but to put together a good distribution for any significantly different culture I think you need to be part of it. I expect a lot of the growth in support for other languages, and cultural needs to come directly from people hacking the code in the countries that need it.

Linux development isnt centralised in Redmond so you can go out and do this. Most of the time we can communicate world wide. Not always. Its really hard sometimes to follow Japanese Linux projects in Europe and the USA. I guess the reverse is probably true.

Next week's interview: Tim O'Reilly
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Interview: Alan Cox Answers More

Interview: Alan Cox Answers

Comments Filter:

  • This is not funny! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is not funny, people! NASA puts the chance of an object of > 30 km radius striking the Earth within the next 25 years at 47% ! Such a strike, in addition to its potentially devastating consequences for the U.S. stock market could, given the right conditions [e.g. *ANOTHER* Linux conference in progress], eliminate much of the leadership in the Linux community.

    We absolutely must begin immediate development of a global early-warning and interdiction system. If this global program should prove too costly, then I suggest we use localized variants [maybe a Smart Pebbles system], protecting areas such as Redwood City, Santa Clara, Wales, Research Triangle, and Monterrey.

    At times like this we need to pull together and work for the greater good of Linux!

  • If Only.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If only Slashdot could get Bill to do a Q/A?

  • What's a PHB? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is there a place to find out what acronyms like this stand for? BTW, I agree with your comment. To document well, whether through commenting or design docs, you must understand your code well enough to explain it to someone else. This kind of understanding should be a prerequisite for any code being included in a project. Some people are happy to compile code they don't completely understand just to see if it works, and this kind of code should be guarded against in production software.

  • Re:This is not funny! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, and I'll bet you believed NASA when they said they sent a man to the moon too.
  • Posted by cookieman.k:


    So, I misspelled some of the words.
    That's because I am not a writer, just a
    simple programmer. My mothertongue is not
    English. I'll try to improve myshelf.

    I was off topic anyway. I was angry on M$
    products (which I must use day by day).

    Thanks anyway.
  • Posted by cookieman.k:


    Don't be scared.
    You won't use my programs.

    Anyway I am not just a Win programer.
    I think every program wich run under Win
    can give you the kind of 'pleasure' you are
    thinking of.
    Look with SoftIce in Win code, while you are
    trying to do some driver stuff.

    Thanks anyway for your reply.
  • The PowerPC port was originally done by Gary Thomas ages and ages ago on I believe early PReP machines. It was later expanded to CHRP and PowerMacs. The BeBox port hasn't gotten too far along. There are stable, but UP kernels for 2.0.31 or so, and there is a test kernel for 2.2.something. However, the Be port just hasn't had anybody with a machine and the time to do all the needed work. In short, Alan wasn't totally correct. :)
  • I GOT 18 disks on a raid!

    Where's the memo on that one?

    I see what you do on company time and bandwidth now....
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~ ^~
  • Why does it matter?

    In public forums, you're supposed to be evaluated on the basis of your ideas - what you post. Not who you are, or whether or not you want to remain anonymous.

    Having an account on slashdot is about as anonymous as getting an account on hotmail. Unless you want to make your name and information (such as email and your website) public, its not required. Frankly, your comment is invalid. I could open another account on slashdot tomorrow and "make up" a name and get a hotmail account and be as anonymous as possible. I dont have any pity on "AC" posters who get overlooked simply because they dont log in or get an account. It takes 10 seconds.
  • MS is already doing that. Didn't you know that MS used to be in Waco, Texas? Its only recently did they move all their resources to Redmond.

    Waco, eh? Hm.. It wouldn't surprise me if MS has a high level manager or director working for them under the guise of "Data Koresh". It all makes sense now...
  • go read Knuth's Literate Programming and
    use WEB and CWEB. Its like the reverse of code.
    Instead of writing code with inline documentation, you write documentation with in-line code, then CWEB TANGLE's it into something the C compiler understands or WEAVE's it into documentation.

    I write alot of my code with CWEB now.
  • As the subject says. Just an observation :-)
  • This isn't an issue confined entierly to this story. Sometimes when their are hundreds of comments on a story you want to browse only the comments which have been moderated up. You don't care if it was by an AC or not.

    Similarly suppose you want to cut out all the flamebait setting your threshold to zero just won't cut it b/c if a registered user gets moderated down he's still at zero while setting it at one cuts out alot of worthwhile AC comments.

    A good solution, when Rob has time, would be to make the AC gets -1 option in the preferences just like the small post option. Then when picking questions for this posts they could just not use the -1 for AC option
  • Unfortunately some AC's ruin it for all AC's. If people were to act like adults and not like idiots, none of this would be a problem.
  • It seems that the corporate and open-source development models have at least one flaw in common: insufficient documentation.

    All too often one finds a section of code that is not commented in-line worth a damn, and there is no thorough "architectural overview" of the project to even help clue you in.

    So to address the question, "What if so-and-so gets hit by a stampeding buffalo?", let's first address a larger issue: how can we get people up-to-speed on development projects more easily?

    For several reasons your issues/complaints are moot.

    1) We have the source code available. That means the actual implementation of our design is available for EVERYBODY to look at and critique. Design documents, review meetings, and a whole host of other mechanisms that the close source community has come up with to avoid open peer review simply are not as effective. How can I say this with certainty. Well, one easy way is to look at the speed with which OSS systems respond to security problems. Security problems are generally not easy to fix, and require a relatively high level of expertise to identify and correct. Yet, OSS continously addresses them more rapidly than closed source software companies.

    2) At a certain fundamental level, I want the kernel to not be super easy to hack on. This keeps people like me from burdening down Linus and Alan with poorly thought out patches. If, there is a certain level of expertise required, then only those people who can actually throw down and do it, do it. This isn't to say that all code should be self obfuscating. Rather, to say that some times, complex systems are complex, and that Joe Average User, who was weaned on GUI's, is rightly going to have a hard time figuring them out.

    scottwimer
  • At my last job, the phrase "what if gets hit by a bus?" arose a few times. We, the work grunts, decided that being hit by a bus was the worst manner of death possible, so we started using the phrase "hit by the beer truck". Being hit by a beer truck was viewed as a more glamourous way of leaving this world. Somehow that made the morbid thoughts of what to do in case of someone's imminent death easier on the brain.

    To quote Ziggy and his friend:

    I want a death by misadventure,
    Wanna die face down in some dude's pool.
    Not gonna kick it in my sleep biting on my dentures,
    When I die, Jack, it's gonna be real cool.

    Not gonna die from drugs, don't wanna go insane,
    Like that Pink Floyd guy, Syd.
    I wanna be on a bus that crashes into a train,
    Just like Ozzy Osbourne did.

    (no man, it was a plane and a train,
    and it was Randy Rhodes)

    Plane and a train? Righteous Cool Death!
  • This is the same BeBox that Phase5 did? Maybe I'm wrong...erm...
  • Maybe no-one thought their questions were any good?
  • Yes

  • Well, you can look at Dave Cutler's fan club [wt.net] - it's not quite the same, though. A bit scary, in fact.

  • ELKS? (Score:1)

    by Xunker ( 6905 )
    I don't suppose this is the same Alan Cox as the one on the ELKS / linux-86 listserv?
  • Guys, you're all worrying too much. Remember that old TV show about Max Headroom? Edison Carter, a TV reporter, is almost killed when his motorcyle runs into roadbloack (which reads MAX HEADROOM 5' 8", hence the name). In the fear that he is about to die, his semi-evil corporate employers (Channel 23) have an in-house teenage computer whiz create a computer clone. Unfortunately, not everything goes right, as the computer clone (Max Headroom) develops a markedly different personality and from there on runs amock in Channel 23's networks. And a short-lived series was born.

    I still find myself drawn to buy more Coca-Cola everytime I see it in reruns on the Sci-Fi channel.

    Anyhow... Linus, Alan, et al., should just get computer clones made now, and we can 'release' them onto the networks of the world if anything happens to the real thing.

    Feel better?

    --Philip
  • When we talk about the "What if so-and-so gets hit by a bus?" question, I think the point is who will provide the vision, leadership and technical skills to keep Linux a stable, well-built OS. It's not about who understands how the kernel works and what each line of code does. There are many people who know code are have the capability to understand it, but, do they have the unique skills to be the driving force behind the kernel.

    -harry
  • It is common practice for vagly journalistic activites to ignore anonymous comments, and ignore ideas from anonymous people.

    If you dont put your name on your works then you shouldnt expect your works to be recogonised.

  • This from somebody who pronounces "aluminum" with two "i"s and 5 syllables. :-)
  • Having the source Makes up for SOME lack of doc's, but I bet I can write a small procedure in C that nobody will ever be able to understand if it isn't documented.
  • Memo? If you're subscribed to linux-raid then there were mentions of it.
    http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
  • I GOT 18 DISKS ON A LINUX RAID! ONE RAID 5 WITH 18 DISKS!

    sorry. I'm just exited and alt-f10 is soo easy...
    http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
  • the newsgroup is not the best place for questions like this. Please submit it to linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
  • IN theory this is true, but in my experience this not so. I have been posting here regularly for quite a while, ive often been moderated up, only once moderated down (off-topic) but only been a moderator once, and then only breifly. I used 2 out of 5 points in 1/2 a day before the moderator status went away (its supposed to last 3 days)

  • Please god, kill Bill Gates with a stampeding buffalo. I'll even drive the buffalo.

    Then a couple of us social misfits should free some buffalo, so you can drive them and kill Bill Gates. Bless the Beasts and Coders!

    Richard Frost

  • Hey, Signal 11, maybe we should ask Alan what he thinks? Maybe our illustrious kernel hacker doesn't have TIME to winnow thru all the dross to get to the gold. I don't see anything wrong with requiring non-anonymity in order to access a scarce resource. Besides, it's Taco's sandbox; if'n you don't like it, the code is open source.

    There are reasons to post anonymously; this isn't one of them. Besides, you have your +2 rating,
    and are IMHO abusing it to call attention to what for you is a non-issue.

    Ob-on-topic-comment: I thought the questions were reasonably well-chosen; nothing truly juicy came out of them, but then, with the accelerated release schedule for 2.4 and the featurelist already public, there wasn't really room enough for anything truly juicy on that front....

    Bah, I'll probably get modd'ed down for this one anyway, wtf...

    --
    Louis, Louis, Louis, STOP WHINING!!!
    -- Lestat
  • A quick question:

    Have you ever actually _read_ Linux' kernel source code? From what I can tell, this is one very well documented project. Only, the source IS the documentation. That, and the kernel mailing list.

    Floris
  • http://www.kernel.org [kernel.org] is the home site for the Linux kernel distribution.

    http://www.linuxdoc.org [linuxdoc.org] is the home site for the Linux Documentation Project, which is also useful.

    The uncompressed kernel source is just under 60 megabytes. Compressed, it is around 12. Text compresses very well.

    Note that, in the future, if you ask a question, leaving an email address for replies is a Good Thing. All I can do here is hope you check your info page and see my reply.
  • the BeBox was made by Be, and it had two 60Mhz PPC chips
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • and moderators don't get any information that we don't. there just regular /. readers. the only diffrence is there's a little HTML form for each post, that you can moderate up and down.

    also, AC's start at one moderation point less then regular readers.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • well..
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • use jpeg
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • cookieman.k@usa.net
    User Bio
    Hi there! Who I am: Linux fan, M$ hater, Win programmer at work (yekk) ... What I Like: JAVA/NETSCAPE/AMD/RIVA/CELERON/MP3/SLASHDOT.ORG/ Who I like: Eve my girl friend /Reeves/deNiro/Pacino/Samuel L Jackson /Madonna/Tori/... my english spelling is ;)

    cookieman.k has posted 1 comments (this only counts the last few weeks)


    I hope to god, I never have the 'plesure' of runing one of the windows programs you write

    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Click Here [tuxedo.org] I don't know if it has PHB (a term for retarted people who manage smart people, from the boss in dilbert) but it's got a lot of other acronimical information :)
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • This is really nice. It should get bumped up to informative/interesting..
  • To agree and combind a few of your statements, MS is not as open as the alternatives. To get into development, I heard that it cost money to get into development. I remember when I had a hard time with linux a while back, before I knew what modules were, I modified the source to use IRQ 5 for com4. And it worked. I self-released to my-self a custom linux kernel to suit my needs. Getting into MS devel is a bit more involved (as you well point out).
  • MS is already doing that. Didn't you know that MS used to be in Waco, Texas? Its only recently did they move all their resources to Redmond.
  • Can you point out where it was said? I am not defending either side. Was there an email or something sent or a url showing this?

    Curious sporty

  • Rightly said. I was following the thread and found a lot of good questions that I'd like answers to. I hope that part II is in the pipeline. It's not often that we get core developers answering questions from everyone else who do not (or is unable to) attend LinuxWorld and other frequently held linux conferences in America.
  • hmm...i wonder if all those linux support startups would agree.
  • Not "a" BeBox. "The" BeBox. A nifty chunk of hardware based on the PPC designed to run Be from the get-go. I've seen them. One model I believe has a neato set of LEDs build into the case that rise and fall with CPU use. But don't quote me on that. : )
  • An example of why this isn't always the answer.

    A couple of months back I was writing a block-device driver for the Rio (MP3 player). The Rio (or actually the Flash) erases in 32K blocks, so I made my block-size 32K. When I did this the kernel went crazy.

    So, great to have source, and yes, I was able to quickly find out that in a certain function there was a test to make sure block-size was smaller than the page size (which is 4K on x86). Since this test failed it caused the kernel to crash.

    However, I could never find this explained/documented, so the question now is, is this a bug or is this by design? And if this is by design is that a good design,- what if I want to use my driver on an other platform that has even smaller pages?

    I posted the problem on a Linux newsgroup and didn't get _any_ reply.

    Breace.
    btw. Je zit in ieder geval bij de juiste provider ;)

  • Alan should have gotten the complete list, and replied to
    those that he found interesting and worthwhile

    There is, of course, nothing stopping Alan doing just this
    if people were to convince him.

  • Who's to argue with blinking lights?
  • uh..

    Why can't you speak coherent english?

    "Why am bothering myshelf?"

    "Whics one API?"

    Come on, you retarded 4th grader.

  • "I was angry on M$ products"? OH GAWD.

    I was angry AT ms products. AT.

    -Warren
  • I could guess with a moderation system in place, people who normally would hold their tounge might just logout and turboflame, on the [reasonable] assumption that nobody but the moderators will see it, so it won't actually bother anyone.

    Well, it could be. Myself, I leave my threshold on 2 and just sorta sneer at posts that annoy me, but hey.
  • If one does NOT understand the source code one does _NOT_ have any business messing with it. Documented or not dumented. Period.

    Why do people always revert to this? This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. Appropriate documentation makes it easier to understand the source in the first place! I am loathe to make broad sweeping statements, but, I must say this: People who don't understand the value of good documentation are missing a valuable and important aspect of programming. This "rambo" coding does nothing but degrade code quality.

    Sorry, but this is a recent "issue" with me because I've had to pick up the pieces from some asshole who thought he was too good to research and document what he was doing before he went coding some difficult and sensitive code. Result?? I rewrote the whole damn thing...properly. I may have been able to reuse some of what he had, but there was no documentation. So I was forced to start over.

    People who don't think documentation is valuable are coding in a black box. End of Story.


    Generic Man
  • (Sigh), let me copy over the first draft(sans HTML). This was the original message. I deleted the Linux != OSS because I thought it was a bit redundant.

    Original (un-edited) message:

    Wow, in your haste to flame Microsoft, you completely failed to understand his message.

    Read this again...carefully:
    It seems that the corporate and open-source development models have at least one flaw in common: insufficient documentation.

    He said corporate(Microsoft) and open-source (Linux) have one flaw in common (BTW, I know Linux != Open Source. I'm trying to reach a particular mindset here.). Documentation is a means, not an end. Documentation doesn't necesarily make better software...it gives developers the ability to make better software. As a result, the "good software potential" for every developer, whether open or proprietary, benefits. That, my rash friend, is the point he was trying to make.
  • Though I find your comments insulting, I will say this...Good code is a combination of easy to read code and appropriate documentation. No one said anything about documentation being a substitute. You made that up.

    Reference Steve McConnell's excellent book, "Code Complete". Specifically chapters 18 and 19: "Layout and Style" and "Self-Documenting Code" respectively.
  • There is a lot of truth in what you say. Those who say comments and documentation aren't important have obviously never had the experience of returning to a large program a few years after writing it. Taking over code written by someone else is harder. It is *possible* to maintain binary code with a disassembler, true, and it is *possible* to maintain source without documentation or comments. But no one should have to.

    The problem as I see it is the disconnect between the documentation and code. Both are descriptions of what the software does, one is readable by humans, the other by the target platform. Problems in both documentation and code arise when the two descriptions aren't equivalent.

    One early attempt to remedy this was COBOL. This was to be a computer language that read like a natural language but could be compiled to a machine language. Little documentation should be necessary given a well-structured program source. Needless to say, COBOL didn't really succeed, the mapping between language and operation was too clumsy to be very effective or useful.

    Knuth's made some good attempts in the direction of unifying human and machine code specificiations in his CWEB [stanford.edu] tool.

    One day, who knows how long from now, programming may consist of having a conversation with a computer, and explaining a problem to it in natural language, while the details of implementation and correctness are mostly left to the computer. Nice documentation may be output, right along with the executable binary.

    If you think that is far-fetched, you may be right. But just this morning I read a report [boston.com] that someone has written software capable of reading a Time magazine and answering questions about it. Very impressive, if true.

    Jim

  • Many AC posts are very worthwhile, and some of these are overlooked in moderation, so they never get seen. What keeps people from just logging in?

    I've logged out to post as an AC at times. Most often I do it because I have something I need to say but I'm concerned about reprisals. I once made the mistake of posting a critical comment while still logged in. Somebody took great offense and chased me around /. for about a month, consistently moderating down my every remark.

    On other occasions, I post as an AC because I want to criticize slashdot or one of its operators. Call me paranoid.

    Sometimes it's just because I've forgotten to log in.

    Regardless of the reason, I'm fully behind the statement of the initial poster. Look at yourself - I've noticed that your own comments are always scored at 2+. I won't suggest that you didn't earn that rating, but I do have to wonder whether I would have even seen your post had you not been given an automatic leg up. Persistent scores make sense, IMO, but only when limited by an expiration period.

    See this article [209.207.224.40] posted to slashdot for further discussion of AC's.

    -konstant
  • I think it would benifit the community greatly were companies like Red Hat to pay people to document the more obscure parts of the kernel.

    It's not just the kernel. Everything needs to be commented. And Red Hat should have the people working for them comment their code, sure. But people who are not being paid need to comment as well, or it won't work. If you write it, you comment it. Simple as that.
    ---
  • For those of you who are worried about forgetting to login, just use a bookmark like this one:

    http://slashdot.org/users.pl?unickname=UserName& returnto=index.pl&upasswd=Passwo rd&op=userlogin

    Every http server that I've ever know accepts GET and POST operations as equivelant....

    Notice that, unlike hotmail, you actually have to supply your password....

  • Re:Cool (Score:1)

    by Kerg ( 71582 )
    my face is a bit red here because I don't know what an invariant is


    Invariant is simply a method or a function that checks the internal state of an object, ensuring that no fields have invalid values.


    For example, if I want to implement an abstract data type with C++, for example a simple ring buffer, I'd most likely use two index variables, head and tail for accessing an array with the buffer data in it. Now its pretty clear to me, that if my tail or head ever gets a negative value, my code has bugs in it (since I'm only using them to point at the data in the array, range of 0..n).


    So I'd define a private method boolean Invariant() that checks that both head and tail are always positive. Then in the two methods I'm implementing for my ADT class pop and push, I'll always call an assert for my invariant, making sure that if ever my indexes turn negative, I get an exception.



    boolean MyClass::Invariant() {
    if (head < 0 || tail < 0) return false;
    return true;
    }

    void MyClass::pop() {
    // do stuff...
    assert(Invariant());
    }

    etc...



    Or even if they're buttheads who don't read it, if it works like asserts. Which is cool.


    Bingo.


    Disclaimer: my C++ is really rusty.

  • An overall document summing up the source trees and how they connect in a gif would be nice.

    Perhaps an updated Kernel-hacking howto would have such (I assume such a howto exists because I think I saw one, once ;-)
  • English is inherently an extremely bastardized language. Its rapid and continual evolution has in fact been a major reason for its success.
    It is also a much less splintered language than it has been in the past when it usage was confined to a much small geographical area.

  • Alan could just as easily go to the comments section of the story where you should your questions, then he could read it and reply to more questions. Nothing is stopping you. Everything is out in the open. :) I'm sure /. wouldn't deny a second interview from Alan.

  • Erg, even my bad gramar is out the in open. :P s/should/put

  • Oh dear, watch out for Microsoft buying Greyhound.

  • Might I inquire where one could get the source? I'd be interested in reading (at least some of) it. It sounds like a good learning experience, although it would probably take me several hours to download it all if it's 60 megabytes. Oh well. Any information would be appreciated.
  • Of course, you yanks have a way of bastardizing the spelling of words, so it may well be "perk" in the US, but that's not where Alan is, is it? :-)

    No, it's not, but unfortunately for your argument, I, like Alan, am in the UK, where it's "perk" (and "cheque" and "colour").

  • Why does it matter?

    In public forums, you're supposed to be evaluated on the basis of your ideas - what you post. Not who you are, or whether or not you want to remain anonymous.

    --

  • You say "Alan should have gotten the complete list". Clearly you have no respect for Alan's time. He's a busy person. The moderation system lets the slashdot regulars vote on the best questions and reduces the amount of stuff Alan needs to respond to.

  • An AC post has a default score of 0, which is normally considered 'no score'. You'll only see a "Score: 0" if someone has been moderated down from 1 or up from -1.

    There is certainly some anti-AC prejudice. Interestingly enough, I've noticed more abuse from ACs since the moderation point system was created.

    D

    ----
  • "Turboflames" that are on topic can contain interesting or insightful remarks.

    What I'm talking about is utter dreck, like the fellow who posted 1,000 line copies of the previous discussion, and the people insulting each other's mothers.

    D

    ----
  • I can't see how you can argue that SlashDot isn't a free (libre et gratis) and open forum. Yes, the moderation scheme isn't perfect, but it's the best one that I've ever seen. If you don't agree with the choices the moderators make,you are also given the option to cruise at -1. Alan Cox had this exact same choice. If he wished to sift through the entire thread and pick which questions he wanted to answer, there's nothing Rob & Co. could do to stop him. (What, they wouldn't publish his responses? Yeah, right! )


    As for your point that AC's are at a disadvantage. I would have to say that they should be. Credibility is not a stateless entity This is why people who have their comments moderated up frequently start posting at a higher level, they have a higher credibility than someone who has just put their two bits in here and there. This is also why people who have been moderated down frequently start posting at a lower level, they've lost their respectability. Due to the nature of AC's, there is not way of imposing this system on them.


    Now to get around to your point that AC's shouldn't be forced to post at 0, because this makes it harder to get to the higher levels. I think that because of the very nature of ac's they should have to "work harder" to get moderated highly. We have no way of establishing identity of them, and therefore now way of assessing their credibility. For logged in posters you can tell who they are, and based on what you've seen of them in the past make a judgement on how skeptical you should be about their opinions. For ACs you have no idea if they even know what they're talking about, or whether they're even telling the truth. As such they should be treated with skepticism. This does actually work in their favour as well though. If I see a highly moderated AC posting I'm quite likely to read it, just because chances are it must be a good post to get moderated up that much.

    Anyways, I should get back to work...

    Mike Bain

  • If Linus were to be hit by a meteor, development resources would have to be shifted. Such high-priority tasks as porting MS-Bob to the PalmPilot would have to be tabled until the relatively unsexy items such as, oh say, clotting, could be completed.

    After that, life would go on. Not to worry.
  • It isn't THAT inconvenient to set up an account, and have a leg up on the AC's, is it?

    I've never really been able to understand the AC thing. I'm not looking for a fight here, just curious.. Many AC posts are very worthwhile, and some of these are overlooked in moderation, so they never get seen. What keeps people from just logging in?
  • having ht esource code makes up for some lacks in documentation. If you do not understand the documentation you can look at the function declaration, and hte function itself, and how it handles things. It does lack in documentation, yes, but it is often better, than trying to fiddle with a messed up API, that does not work as it is supposed to. Also something to note is that many of the M$ API's are not very well documentened either, and sometimes it is just hard to get there documentation too.
  • Perk is what gets the coffee ready. Perq is access to the coffee.

    ---------
  • That's a lovely communist approach to things, but you're deceiving yourself if you think that your local LUG would rather hear your ideas about the tcp stack--no matter how valid--over Alan Cox's.

    Anonymous posters choose to remain anonymous and are thereby ceding a certain amount of credibility in the process. Registered posters only need to give up a small amount of their anonymity, an email address, which is available to the /. staff but not regular users.

    Woe is me. How terribly unfair.
  • Exactly. I think it would benifit the community greatly were companies like Red Hat to pay people to document the more obscure parts of the kernel. This is especially important as the changes are so rapid and the systems are always evolving (for example: modules in 2.0 to modules in 2.2)
    But then again:

    I GOT 18 disks on a raid!
    http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
  • ac> Ultimately the only real way to improve
    ac> security is careful auditing of packages.

    There may be other, complimentary, ways of improving Linux security. For many years, people in the security research community have been working on systems whose security relies only upon the kernel, or a small part of the kernel sometimes called a reference monitor (RM). The general idea is, once you've implemented your RM properly, it will guarantee certain useful global security properties even in the presence of user-space applications with exploitable bugs. I personally believe that implementing an RM in the theoretically optimal way would probably make unreasonable and unacceptable demands on the Linux architecture. However, I suspect that a sub-optimal implementation in a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) could provide some security benefits with zero impact to the Linux code-base. The LOMAC project is implementing an experimental prototype of such an LKM-based RM, which may be downloaded under the GPL from ftp://ftp.tislabs.com/pub/lomac . If the LOMAC experiment succeeds, LKM-based tools like it may become a useful complement to the careful auditing of packages.

    - Tim Fraser, NAI Labs
  • Thanks for answering my questions!

    Hope a few of the good 4-rated and 3-rated comments from this past round get thrown in the pot for the next edition of Ask Alan.
  • To a certain degree, Microsoft does provide developer contact. They just don't publish it in "mainstream" press.

    The Microsoft Developer's Network is the first line of contact with the developers: "here's a huge stack of CDs of everything we think you might need to develop for our OS."

    You can also get significant interaction with developers and evangelists at trade shows. When I was programming games I found that the time spent at Microsoft Meltdown was invaluable. You get to schedule time in a hotel suite with DirectX developers from Microsoft to review your code and get pointers on how the OS works. Plus, it's their front-line for input on new features to add.

    I was even invited to spent a few days in Redmond at the offices to get direct interaction with DirectX developers.

    However, Microsoft is a traditional company when it comes to trade secrets. You didn't get invited to Meltdown without signing NDAs. OpenSource eliminates the need for NDAs and lawyers in general.

    Microsoft's position is also bound by the fact that they are in the business of creating de facto standards. Linux is based on open standards. The concept of open community interaction is there from the initial stages of development.
  • First off-I may loose all moderation priviledges (I am not one right now) from this point forward-but I would like to clarify that I have been a moderator several times...and not once, regarding ANY issue was I ever contacted nor asked to ignore AC comments.

    I can see why you are upset that NO AC questions were used in the interview-but I can assure you that there is no conspiracy. I set my threshold to 1, and it is sometimes left there while I have been a moderator-I assume I am not alone,which would explain why a lot of them are overlooked in the first place.

    With all the agony of First Post! and Meeppphhtt! etc.. that had to be accepted before /. came up with the threshold option...That is why I now use it to keep from having to look at that crap.

    As far as any of this goes, why should Alan HAVE to weed through dozens of questions-maybe he just didn't want to. He was doing US a favor by doing the interview - /. was just making it easier on him..and I think that they were good questions and it was a great interview-next time why not just log in?

    p.s. I was not a moderator at the time the questions were asked either.
  • Hi,

    I just read the interview and wondered what Alan ment with the PPC port starting on a BeBox? Was there not porting done to PPC before the BeBox? Does Alan have a BeBox? I am amazed at the far reaches of Be here :)
    Can someone, even Alan, clarify? :)

    Oliver
  • I have spoken (chatted) with jkh of freebsd and as witness to this little thingy (q&a?) this is what MS lacks. One on one, knowing who is behind the magic availibility. Hell, most of the opensource os's seem to be this way. With BSD/OS and Windows XX, I haven't the least clue how to find the guy who wrote XXX in the os, how to find it, edit it, fix it or much less support it.

    Right on opensource os's! FreeBSD, Linux and others!

  • It sure didn't sound like Roblimo or whoever passed the questions along anticpated the outstanding response and was a little overwhelmed. (I didn't look at most of the questions; I thought I'd seen the cream with the answers by Alan.) So I don't think they had score criteria before they went in. That would make it hard to inform people ahead of time. They may not have even taken all the score 5 questions (I haven't taken the time to look...)

    Since I've seen /. comments by someone professing to be Alan Cox, presumably he could go back to the forum and look at the other high scored questions (whether by an ACoward (two different AC acronyms... 8-) ) or not) and answer them if he'd like.

    From what I understand about these interviews, /. has been able to get the interview and then instead of coming up with their own lamo questions, they throw the doors open to the masses. There's always going to be some good questions that don't get answered. How are you going to decide?

    I don't think there's any question about this being an "open and public forum".
  • The truth is that ACs were put at a disadvantage.

    Except that there wasn't any reason to be anonymous for this. Unless there were well-phrased questions of the form "Why does Linux suck?" (and I don't know if that could be done), there wasn't anything political going on. Certainly in this discussion there could be unpopular views that someone doesn't want reveal an identity. But not asking a question.

    Do you think Alan Cox would personally respond to a question from a random anonymous email address? If no, then this is a moot point. If yes, then you may have a point, but I still can't see what you would want to ask anonymously.

    Comments ought to be scoredsoley and entirely on the basis of their content - not extraneous factors like whether you logged in or not.

    We already know this isn't the case. Logged-in posters start with 1, ACs with 0. Those are the rules of this game, Don't like it, take your ball and go home. The prejudice is already there. You knew this going in.

    People need anonymity for a few reasons.

    Posting a message that will bring harm to them. I don't think there's ever this on /., except if insiders are posting infomation that will get themselves fired or cut off from the information.

    Posting an unpopular view. If you don't want to deal with flames, you may post devil's advocate stuff. This is probably the majority of legitimate /. anonymity.

    Posting a view contrary to their established positions. If someone (like a political candidate) has to be "tough on drugs", but they're a closet pot smoker, anonymity gives them some leeway between their public and private lives. (Doesn't solve the hypocrisy, but maybe that's not the battle to fight at that particular time.) I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sometimes (e.g. a Linux supporter thinks one particular thing is stupid, but doesn't want to "taint" his rep)

    Someone who doesn't want to be tracked. In this case, they would also don't trust the /. maintainers to keep their real (off-Slashdot) identity secret.

    Those are all legitimate reasons, but again, I can't see how they apply to asking pertinent questions to an interview subject.

    The downside of anonymity, you get people who post drivel like "ALAN COX SUX" with, of course, no reasons why. (Not even a whining "he didn't answer my question"...) I'm willing to put up with that because there are times you need anonymous voices.

    Like this discussion. I could totally see someone posting what you did as an AC, because it threatens the established (Taco, Hemos, et al.) authority.

    Asking Alan a question wasn't one of those times though... Unless you can come up with a legitimate reason...

  • "...and the ability to manipulate ip packets by thought."

    They can't do that now?
  • someone put a little too much crack on their cereal this morning.
  • I think probably what Alan meant was that, up until recently with IBM releasing a PPC mobo spec, the only companies to really make a "PPC box for the masses" have been Apple and Be, and of course Apple doesn't really count since they don't want to release hardware specs for their machines, so the PPC boxen have been relegated to a sort of backwater where only freaks like the guys at Be and the LinuxPPC folks like to play in.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • The primary reason there is such a lack of documentation is because it is not nearly as much fun to write as code. Declaring that people should document their code will never work unless you made it less painful to do so.

    Perhaps if you knew interested parties were going to look over your code you would comment it for the gloat factor. Usually the more ingenious the code the more proud you are of it and the harder it is to understand. If you had someone to show off to, you'd be more inclined to comment it.

  • Re:No, it's "perq". (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 1999 @03:30AM (#1706529)
    >Of course, you yanks have a way of bastardizing the spelling of words...

    You mean "yanqs" of course...

  • Grow up. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 1999 @04:35AM (#1706530)

    It seems like the corporate closed-source model has several flaws, the most aggregious of which is.. no source code access!

    A) I've seen the source for MFC (it's distributed with their compiler) and you don't want to look at it, believe me :) On the other hand, if you're using MFC, you often have to RTFS, because the docs are a joke. The source isn't very well commented either, I'm afraid. Much time is wasted.

    B) IMHO the most egregious fault of the Free Software movement is an inability to spell. I'd still rather deal with that than MFC, of course.


    There are thousands of open-source projects, some as small as a few lines of code. Who are WE? doesn't the we that is YOU work for M$?

    The "we" that he's referring to is "we software developers". That's abundantly clear in his post. Yessiree Bob, them fiends -- fiends, I tell you! -- who code at MS are programmers too, much like the heavenly angels in the free software camp.


    I'm going to assume that you're claming that closed-source corporate software DOES have this,

    You can assume anything you like, but the point of his entire post was that MS does not have that. Here's his second sentence, which seems to have escaped your comprehension (even though you quoted it):

    It seems that the corporate and open-source development models have at least one flaw in common: insufficient documentation.

    Get it? I think your second "aggregious [sic]" flaw is an inability to understand simple declarative sentences in the English language.


    please, don't give me any line of shit about corporate $oftware being better than OSS. It's bullshit.

    He said nothing of the kind. He's developed some software and he's seen how the process works, and now he's offering some thoughts about how the process might be improved. In his opinion, his thoughts on the subject apply equally to both open and closed development. IMHO he's right, too, even though he's not suggesting anything terribly revolutionary. IIRC Knuth has been on a similar kick for years. If he did anything wrong, he may have been assuming his audence consisted of programmers. Of course there are a lot of them around Slashdot, but there are also a lot of dingbats like you.

  • A minor gripe... (Score:3)

    by HoserHead ( 599 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @05:41AM (#1706531)
    .. and that's that my question [209.207.224.40] didn't get answered. I actually really did want it answered, and it was very quickly moderated up to 5, but then some rogue moderator came along and decided to make things difficult for everyone else, and moderated my post as flamebait.

    Ok, I'm as sick and tired of everyone complaining about moderation, censorship, and those sorts of things as anyone else. But the system plain doesn't work unless people honestly and fairly moderate things. I guess I'll just e-mail Alan directly to ask him the question.

    Of course, now it's up to 5 again - after the questions had been sent to Alan. gah.

    Actually, in the off chance Alan's reading this article: Alan, how much of your software development is done because of a contract, and how much just for the fun of hacking?

  • What happens if Linus gets hit by a meteor (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @02:21AM (#1706532)
    I'll concede that two or even three people getting hit by busses is improbable; but meteors do a lot more damage, and can take out a hemisphere or more. I'd suggest to Alan that he and Linus never be in the same hemisphere at the same time, and that at least resources be devoted to a rocket that can take at least one of them to a planet far away in the event of Earth's destruction. Who knows; they may land on a planet whose sun gives them powers such as flight, x-ray vision and the ability to manipulate ip packets by thought.

  • Docs *ARE* useful (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @06:59AM (#1706533) Homepage Journal
    While there are some definite troll elements in the original post, they do make a good point: Documentation is useful and important. And I mean, beyond the kernel source instructions themselves. There are a number of reasons for this. I thought they were well-known, perhaps not.

    For one, stating the design and then implementing it has been shown to increase code quality. More importantly, it means you know what the code *should* be doing. This makes "Is this a bug?" questions much easier to solve. I've noticed a lot of patches on the linux-kernel list arise from misunderstandings due to unclear code.

    Then there is the generally accepted fact that programmers of all skill levels sometimes forget things. How many here have gone back to their own code they wrote six months ago, and said to themselves, "What does this do?" I know some kernel hackers have -- that same phrase shows up in the Linux kernel source!

    Linux is contributed to by tens, if not hundreds, of developers. Not *all* of them are going to be Seventh Level Hackers like Linus and Alan. For someone who is, say, just tring to implement an input device driver, it would be nice if some of the magic_kernel_functions() were explained a little clearer.

    I'm not saying every function should be documented complete with purpose, arguments, return value, pre- and post-conditions. If someone wants to do that, more power to them, but I'm not saying It Must Be.

    However, some things could be added, to positive effect: Top-of-file comments explaining what is contained in a file. Brief comments explaining which a function is supposed to do. A guide to where key kernel structures, macros, etc., come from.

    A lot of this stuff was laid out very well in the Kernel Hacker's Guide and similar documents, but they have fallen far out of date. Documention for the 2.2 and 2.3 series kernels is very lacking.

    I would try my hand at doing some of this, but frankly, I don't understand much of the kernel myself. I've been reading source lately trying to figure some stuff out, but with almost *SIXTY MEGABYTES* of kernel source, that is a lot of reading!

    Just my 1/4 of a byte. :-)

  • If only docs were adequate... (Score:3)

    by -=[ SYRiNX ]=- ( 79568 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @02:51AM (#1706534) Homepage
    I'm a developer at M$, and I've watched the Linux community for a couple of years now too. It seems that the corporate and open-source development models have at least one flaw in common: insufficient documentation. All too often one finds a section of code that is not commented in-line worth a damn, and there is no thorough "architectural overview" of the project to even help clue you in. So to address the question, "What if so-and-so gets hit by a stampeding buffalo?", let's first address a larger issue: how can we get people up-to-speed on development projects more easily? The answer is to simply shift our philosophical viewpoint. We should place correctness, thoroughness, and efficiency of _documentation_ on the same priority level as correctness, thoroughness, and efficiency of _code_. Then you don't have to worry about a project dying just because a few key people left and took all the knowledge with them! This means commenting (in the code) the purpose and inner functioning of every function so that a newcomer can immediately see what the function does, why it gets called (and from where), and how it works inside. This means modifying your original design specs as you go along to reflect what is actually happening in the project as it takes shape, so that at the end of the project you have a complete architectural overview that one could read to easily see how the project fits together.

  • No, it's "perq". (Score:4)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @03:13AM (#1706535) Homepage
    Short for "perquisite".

    Of course, you yanks have a way of bastardizing the spelling of words, so it may well be "perk" in the US, but that's not where Alan is, is it? :-)

    (And the piece of paper you sign authorizing the back to give somebody your money is a cheque. A check is a pattern of alternate colo[u]r squares.)

  • Re:Death By Misadventure (Score:4)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @06:05AM (#1706536) Homepage Journal
    Well, I want to die quietly, peacefully, in my sleep like Grandpa did. Not screaming and crying like his passengers.

    (I know -- this joke is so old it collects a pension now. I couldn't resist.)

  • Grand Bus Conspiracy (Score:5)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Friday September 03, 1999 @03:22AM (#1706537)
    It used to be "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus" now its "What happens if Linus and Alan both get hit by busses". I guess someone like DaveM would take over (yes next years question is "What happens if Linus, Alan and DaveM get ...")

    Reading this, a strange image comes to mind....

    "Thank you for coming, gentlemen..."

    "Cut the crap, Bill. Why did you want us here?"

    The speaker glares. "No names", he replies. "As for why I called us togeather... I understand this is highly irregular. Normally we would be attempting to tear each other apart in the marketplace. And I know that means there's no love lost towards me. However, today we are seeing a bigger enemy. All our business is dependant on proprietary technology. Today, the threat to our business models is not each other... it's open source."

    There is a wave of grumblings and grudging agreements. One speaker blurts out "OK... sure... but what do we do? Many of our numbers are attempting to embrace it to survive..."

    The speaker frowns. "You'll notice THEY aren't here. No... there is another solution. Destroy open source. Destroy its poster child: Linux."

    More grumbling. The speaker grins.

    "Obviously you think I'm insane. Gentelmen, I'm not. We have a solution. Cut off the head, and the snake dies. You'll note that a year or two ago... if a bus had hit Linus Torvalds... it may have stopped this menace before it surfaced. Now it would take two, possibly three bus incidents. Gentlemen, we must act now! The plan is simple... at the next big Linux convention, we pool our collective resources togeather and charter lots and lots of busses...."

    The plot thickens. And I swear to cut down on Penguin mints...

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