On Mon, 18 Mar 2002 09:27:21 +0800, Leon Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sunday 17 March 2002 17:23, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > > "Anyone who says you can have a lot of widely dispersed people hack away on > > a complicated piece of code and avoid total anarchy has never managed a > > software project." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 1992, writing to Linus Torvalds. > > He could still be right. Is it fair to describe what Linus is doing as > `managing'? (-: > > A similar situation arises in education. People can't see how homeschooling > can even compete, given the `decisive disadvantages' of no central planning, > no huge resource base, no standardisation, and are invariably amazed to > discover that the average homeschooled child is miles ahead (typically > around 20 percentile points in any given subject) of the average systematised > child, and that with far less hours devoted to actual classwork. > > What Mandrake is attempting to do, with great success, is ride the chaotic > creative wave, but also keep the still water of systematisation and > standardisation under their keel. > > I think it works like the modern Americas Cup yachts: the still water is > pumped out through the hull and forms a thin, lubricating and protecting skin > there; the rest of the ride is wild. (-: > > Cheers; Leon
Linus's style of management is quite loose. Because of the GPL, anyone can make their own modifications to the kernel, and even maintain their own branches. Nobody really has to listen to Linus if they don't want to, but many do so out of respect. Linus himself likes to refer to kernel development as 'evolution' rather than 'design': "... I will claim that nobody else "designed" Linux any more than I did, and I doubt I'll have many people disagreeing. It grew. It grew with a lot of mutations - and because the mutations were less than random, they were faster and more directed than alpha-particles in DNA." -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "Gartner recommends that enterprises... immediately investigate alternatives to [Microsoft] IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache... [T]hey have much better security records than IIS..." -- John Pescatore, Information Security Strategies, Gartner Group, 2001-09-19.
