[Ksummit-2009-discuss] Meeting userspace requirements

[Steven Rostedt]

 First, I must apologize for my autoreply. It was a quick script I wrote 
before leaving and I forgot that I do not filter out this mailing list 
from my inbox. It will not happen again.

On Sun, 12 Jul 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
>    "What that means is that we don't need a policeman and a lawyer in
>     every transaction, and that's great, because now, just like these
>     high-trust countries that I spoke of before, we can effect
>     transactions quite readily and easily. So the cost in engaging in
>     transactions is lower, more transactions occur, and we have more
>     wealth creation and greater prosperity. There are downsides to
>     that. For example, people will find loopholes and try to exploit
>     them, which certainly people of the finance industry did. But by
>     and large, I think having these decentralized economies that are
>     based on most people most of the time being moral, being
>     reciprocal, means that we can do lots of things we couldn't do
>     otherwise."
> 
> Let's apply this to Linux kernel development; if we blindly accept
> every random patch that some crackpot tries submitting, the whole mess
> would be come unmaintanable and unreliable very quickly.  Yet if we
> subject each of the 563 patches personally authored by Ingo between
> 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 to the same degree of scrutiny that an unknown
> developer submitted, we'd never be able to maintain our development
> rate.  So the fact that we could be subject to manipulation is, I
> would argue, a necessary evil --- just as the fact that I can
> relatively fearlessly invest money in a stock fund, also occasionally
> a Bernie Madoff comes along; the two are basically two faces of the
> same coin.
> 

It is not just trust that the code written by Ingo is going to be good or 
not. It is the trust that if it breaks, Ingo will fix it. With a new 
comer, even if the code is excellent, if something breaks, who will be 
around to fix it? No one knows if that new comer will still be around to 
fix it if a bug was found in that code. Ingo has taken things from me 
with the trust that if it breaks, I'll fix it quickly.

-- Steve