On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Binand Sethumadhavan <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:20:22AM +0530, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote: >> Ok, so my local dentist wants to do heart surgeries to prolong life by >> about 78%. Would you like to be the first patient and hence become >> famous? > > Straw man. In any case, it will depend upon the availability and cost > of other heart surgeons, the threat to my life from heart disorders, > and a number of other factors.
You either did not understand or conveniently decided to ignore the point I was trying to make. Just because Mr Saraswat has accomplished great feats in the field of missile technology, it does not mean that he has a clue in the field of Operating Systems and computing. > We have no clue how DRDO plans to do what it proposes to - whether > they are taking an existing OS and modifying it, or going to develop > one completely from scratch. The former has been done before - > SELinux, for example. Yes, we do not know how they're going to do this; in fact we do not know anything other than the fact that we're going to build an OS and that Mr. Saraswat is going to head this. The reason Mr. Saraswat is a man without a clue is because he has not shown himself as having any clue how operating systems (or any other critical software) development works. That is why he is making statements claiming that keeping source code closed is going to keep it secure, we will share the source with some other companies in a super-secret way once it is done so that they can write apps for us, etc. Show the code or make a working prototype, then talk. And the key thing about SELinux is that it is open source, there were no fat claims before even putting out a prototype and that it was developed in a department of the US DoD that is known for its computing prowess, the NSA and hence would obviously have been headed by someone who has a clue about how software development works. All of this is exactly the opposite of the scenario with the DoD. > - it will cost you Rs. 10 and postage. I personally don't think > keeping the source code "closed" is going to be practical - after all, > he'd want applications to be ported to his new OS, which would mean a > lot of people outside of DRDO's hand-picked team having access to the > source code of his OS. There is a difference between software and the API. One only needs to expose an syscall API to have other software (third-party applications) interact with their OS. There is nothing wrong with the DRDO developing their own internal OS or modifying another OS for their special purposes. In fact, I expected that we would already be doing something like this and was slightly disappointed that we weren't. But going out in public and making these claims without even putting out a plan and saying that it is going to be super-secret is just nonsense. -- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.in -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
