An OutoftheMain Activity 3795

People were taking a chance. This doesn't make code readily availabe to regular people.

Hobbyist code, with due respect to those hackers^Wexperimentors, is not code that has been put through the wringer, rinsed and repeated. So, at best, it may have been clever, but may not have been the best code where best implies having had to go through the tradeoff processes that code running on serious computer systems had to go throught.

And all of this exploding you talk about happened after a decade's worth of no sources. Look. The computing biz changes almost 100% every five years. A decade of no training is two generations' worth of uneducated coders, users, testers, distributors, etc.

Right. Now think what you had to have up and running in order to sit down with a text editor, include hardware and software in the infrastructure.

You have just made my point.

Exactly. Those that frowned would not have allowed source access of the stuff they were running. This was, and is, a security and ownership issue. We haven't solved this problem yet. Linus is trying something new. I still don't know if the methods will work long-term. I don't know how he produces his seed corn.

I suspect it was a token demonstration for local politics. It would vary based on the funding.

And the key was cheap gear.

I've heard good things about Python. It seems to wear well with math-types who do research in numerical analysis.

BAH