And someone has one... Re: Virus Alert !!!

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Thu Mar 8 12:48:05 2001

It was thus said that the Great Sellam Ismail once stated:
>
> On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, John Foust wrote:
>
> > I've often thought about what the rag-tag open source community would
> > do if they had the Windows source - the whole kit and caboodle. I'd
> > guess that the entire Microsoft source base (counting apps, developer
> > tools, in-house tools, and all the DDK (device driver) tools, etc.)
> > are close to two orders of magnitude more code and data than the
> > average four-CD Linux distro. Frankly, I don't think they could
> > handle it. Does the open source community have the same number of
> > full-time man-hours available to a new task of this size? What about
> > writers and managers, not just counting programers?
>
> C'mon, John. You're a programmer. But surely you must have forgotten
> what it was like to be a young programmer tearing up code to bits late
> into the night.

  The two largest open source projects, Linux and Mozilla, both total maybe
3-4 million lines of code. It's estimated that there are anywhere from 5 to
50 million lines of code in Windows.

  You also have to contend with finding any open source programmers willing
to even *work* with Microsoft code.

> Programmers would descend upon MS code like locusts and just eat that shit
> up. You wouldn't see change over night, but within a year (probably
> less) reports would come out of people finding and fixing numerous
> major bugs in all sorts of MS offerings, the first probably being the MS
> kernel. Bugs that MS staff either wouldn't acknowledge were there or
> probably didn't KNOW were there.

  When Netscape was released, it was 1.5 million lines of code (I counted.
Very boring work 8-) and it took *how* long to get a working version? Two
years? When it was released, Netscape wouldn't even compile, since large
portions where ripped out because of cross licensing issues. And I know
there is IBM code within Windows (or the MS-DOS portion). That has to
either come out, or some deal struck with IBM to release that code.

  And that's just IBM. Who know what other companies have code in there?

> And who the hell needs managers to code anyway? Pfah!

  You've never had to maintain code, have you?

  -spc (Let me tell you about hacker code ... it ain't pretty ... )
Received on Thu Mar 08 2001 - 12:48:05 GMT