Just a hobby, won't be big and professional ... [LWN.net]

Just a hobby, won't be big and professional ...

Posted Aug 2, 2005 21:33 UTC (Tue) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28)
Parent article: On corporate PR and proper credit

Montavista ought to lay claim to integration, testing, QA, and support of Ingo's efforts. And they could emphasize their initial contributions to preemption in the 2.6 kernel. But to omit mention that the work is 80+% Ingo's is simply unethical.

Unfortunately, we are seeing more companies that enhance and/or bundle free software issuing these type of press releases. There's a strong desire to portray themselves as "big and professional," in contrast to "a handful of hackers with a hobby." They don't get it -- Linux has bested the "big and professional" operating systems -- in no small part due to the major contributions of a handful of individuals like Ingo Molnar, whether working in their spare time, or now employed to do Linux development full-time.

(Log in to post comments)

Ingo Molnar and the many virtues of parsimonious design.

Posted Aug 2, 2005 22:24 UTC (Tue) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28) [Link]

Fair reader, if you'd like to wash that bad taste from your mouth, and re-live the thrill brought on by Ingo's shredding of the MindCraft benchmarks, I'd suggest (re-)reading Timothy Dyck's fine 2001 article on the TUX web server, TUX: Built for Speed.

This amusing sentence appears in a companion article that details the eWeek benchmarks ( Devils and Details of Benchmark Tests):

"The most unexpected testing issue that came up was our inability to saturate the Tux-based Web server on our standard test server configuration because it was so fast, a problem that forced us to remove two processors from the four-way Dell PowerEdge 6400 server (which was equipped with two Gigabit NICs and 2GB of RAM). This was the only way the testbed of 80 workstations could max out the Tux server (see benchmark chart)."