From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Subject: Re: netlink tester program Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 20:46:45 -0700 (PDT) Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <20030602.204645.48505284.davem@redhat.com> References: <3EDC1418.6080808@monmouth.com> <20030602.202233.39180859.davem@redhat.com> <3EDC18F2.6090505@monmouth.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: jsd@monmouth.com In-Reply-To: <3EDC18F2.6090505@monmouth.com> Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org From: "John S. Denker" Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 23:41:38 -0400 If we are taking the legal system as our model of openness, then open-source software has come to a sorry pass indeed. It does have connections where a "user" wants to do something with FOO but does not wish to do the legwork necessary to be an expert in FOO. They hire an expert. Or, in our case, they make an expert interested in the thing they want to do :-))) It is also important to distinguish what's best for *you* and what's best for the project. Maybe *you* don't want to be responsible for doing all the documentation. I'm not even going to attempt to document something that moves as fast as the kernel. I go to bookstores and I see many excellent attempts to document kernel internals, but these books are frozen in time. Specifically they are frozen in the time of the moment the kernel they write for is published. As a consequence they are all obsolete the moment they are published. Some poor student reads these books, written against 2.4.8 or whatever, then they go and try to contribute to 2.5.x and it doesn't work except for certain kinds of drivers where we've kept the APIs more or less the same. But I don't care that people do this, just don't require that I do it. I think this extra fluidity we get from being able to change so fast is a strength not a weakness.