[nycbug-talk] interesting read

[Bob Ippolito]

On May 21, 2005, at 11:41 AM, Isaac Levy wrote:

> On May 21, 2005, at 1:14 PM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
>
>
>> On Sat, 21 May 2005, Dru wrote:
>>
>>
>>> http://homepage.mac.com/yaztromo/iblog/C721686556/E320292175/
>>>
>> Frankly, in healthcare, for life-critical applications, there  
>> isn't all
>> that much benefit for going with open sores.
>>
>> I'll ask you this: Will you trust your life to an open-source  
>> application?
>
> I'd Absolutely trust Open Source software over proprietary  
> counterparts, especially if it came out of the BSD camps where  
> software is taken this seriously in contexts like this.

Yeah if the software was open source, and I audited it myself, then  
I'd trust it more... but if I'm dying, I don't think that's going to  
happen regardless of the source code's status :)

I've seen lots of shitty software, both open and closed.  I haven't  
seen any evidence that open source software is better designed or  
written just because it is open (peruse freshmeat, CPAN, etc. if you  
don't believe me), and I have seen evidence that very good software  
does exist outside of open source.  In either case, good software is  
the exception and not the rule, and it really depends on *who*  
designed it and implemented it, not how they did it and what license  
it falls under.

> (i.e. thinking about it, I'd generally not trust my life to any  
> Linux, or about 90% of the software in the world- open or closed)
>
> I'll be sending flames to /dev/null on that one.

You sure live dangerously, trusting your life to 10% of the world's  
software!  Are you sure you didn't mean 99.999%? Have you looked at  
freshmeat or versiontracker lately?

-bob