[Discuss] CrowdStrike Fiasco (eBPF)

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:04:31 -0700
Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> But there is no reason proprietary software can't be good, just that 
> that one pressure for quality is reduced when sources are kept secret.

I think this doesn't hold up to practical scrutiny. I have seen plenty
of horrible, ugly open source programs: everything Lennart Poetering has
written, for example. Or ShareLaTeX which was (might still be) so bad
that it won't compile outside the developers' unreproducible build
environment.

In my experience, the license has nothing to do with quality. What
matters is people and time: enough people with appropriate skills and
sufficient time will produce something good. Cut any of these and the
results will not be good. Cut all of them and the results will be
worse. How many mission critical open source projects are supported by
too few people in their spare time?

The only bearing the license has on this is that volunteer programmers
typically aren't forced by managers and publishers to do the impossible
to meet arbitrary release schedules. Of course, abusive management
practices are not required of proprietary software as Larian Studios
demonstrated with Baldur's Gate 3. So... yeah. License is not a measure
of software quality.

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