Download as Flash video (.flv)
Linus Torvalds discusses Kernel quality, the release cycle and Git.
Linus speaks about the Linux Kernel Summit and shares his thoughts on kernel quality, regressions and the state of the current release cycle. He also shares his thoughts on userland tools and the Git development community.
SINGAPORE--Big software releases like Windows Vista mark the end of "planned software" for the industry, according to Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst.
Speaking at a forum here Friday, Whitehurst said the proprietary, "top-down, planned" software development model characteristic of closed source companies is coming to an end--one which is demonstrated by the number of bugs in Vista, he said.
Whitehurst claimed that there are "half the number of bugs in Linux per thousand lines" compared to the Microsoft operating system, because of the open source collaborative model.
Vulnerability research company, Secunia, released a report earlier this year stating there were more flaws reported last year for Red Hat operating systems than for Microsoft operating systems. This was denied by a Red Hat security team member.
Whitehurst explained his position in an interview with ZDNet Asia later, saying closed source models are hampered by the limit to the amount of planning that can be done during the development process to foresee all the roadblocks that might come up. "If software gets too big, it cannot be organized. This is an indicator of what can be planned," he said.
The Linux stack, on the other hand, "had to be modular" because of how vast development efforts on it spread. Development from the global open source community happens in tandem and at a rate not pre-planned by a "monolithic vendor", he said.
However, because of the modular development model and the number of parties checking through for errors, open source software comes out with fewer errors and is more organized, he explained.
Linus Torvalds has integrated a large collection of patches prepared by (Ext) filesystem developer Theodore Ts'o (tytso) into the main development branch of Linux. It contains a patch for Ext4 which allows it to present itself as ext4 instead of ext4dev. This signals that with the next kernel version 2.6.28, the successor to ext3 will finally leave behind its "hot" development phase. The kernel developers integrated an early version of Ext4 in the main development branch of Linux 2.6.19 in order to jointly develop it to maturity there.
Useful Links