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Who wrote itWho wrote itPosted Apr 1, 2008 16:34 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828)In reply to: Who wrote it by coriordan Parent article: The Linux Foundation's kernel development paper
But equally, you can't compare new code and old code by what it says it does on the tin. If the 2004 version was totally rewritten, that could indicate serious problems with the older code that couldn't be remedied in an evolutionary manner: even if the old code allocated widgets, if it did so in such a manner that it was basically unusable to some large proportion of people, then it's not really relevant that the "feature" was around in 2000 or earlier.
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Who wrote it Posted Apr 1, 2008 16:57 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Even if a rewrite is truly needed, the work of the first programmer is still more than zero and the work of the rewriter is still less than 100% of the task. I'd guess in most situations, the rewriter did less work than the guy who wrote the original. My point being that the first 6 years of development was more important in terms of moving the project from non-existant to perfect than the work in the subsequent 12 years, but the analysis in the linked document attributes importance in the opposite way. Imagine a company who spent the nineties trying to keep free software back by denying us documenation, but who then hired a kernel hacking team in the last five years to sqeeze out 5% better performance here, 10% there, and scale it up to extreme case. That company "scores" highly in the linked document, while hackers who did great work when we had little, like Alan Cox, "score" quite low. There's nothing false in the linked document, I just think a lot of people will misinterpret it.
Who wrote it Posted Apr 1, 2008 16:59 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] Even if the "widget allocator" had horrible problems, the original author still merits credit. Why? Because, like Edison said about the lightbulb, he discovered some of the many ways *not* to do it. That is a very useful discovery.
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