Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps [LWN.net]

Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps

Posted Oct 21, 2004 6:14 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps by lakeland
Parent article: How to kill a web browser

As I recall, the GNU utilities didn't do "extremely well"; they just did better than any of the commercial equivalents extant at the time. That's not the same thing.

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GNU vs proprietary utilities and garbage input

Posted Oct 23, 2004 19:28 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

If it's the study I'm thinking of, it was the first of its kind and was groundbreaking.

ca. 1989, a university research project fed garbage input to a bunch of classic Unix programs and watched them crash. They found that the proprietary programs crashed more than GNU. It wasn't a LOT more, but the fact that it wasn't a lot less flew in the face of conventional wisdom at that time, which was that proprietary software had to have fewer bugs than free software because of all the money behind it for testing and other quality assurance activity.

Then the same team shed some light on the reason for the difference by repeating the study on current versions of the same programs two years later. At the conclusion of the original, they had reported the bugs, and fixes where possible, to the maintainers. In the followup, most of the free software had been fixed, almost none of the proprietary had.

This made sense to me as a software developer for IBM. I certainly didn't have the power to fix a bug in my program just because I found out about it. But free software developers can quite easily fix a bug.

That was the beginning of my conviction that shipping debuggable, fixable code early is better than shipping presumably bug-free code late.