I found this post by an ex-MS, now google, employee, interesting- he talks about how a patch by a google employee gets to users within days, while a patch by MS core OS employees sits around for years. I know corporate types claim to hate regular updates, but they are growing increasingly accepting of them in a web context, and it seems like linux distros have the ability (if they tried) to offer regular, quick, well-tested fixes.[1] It obviously isn’t something that has commercial potential right now, but I’m surprised no one is at least testing it/poking at the idea (as far as I know), given that everyone has the (non-QA) infrastructure for it.
On a less idle note, I hate it when people have an opportunity to participate in something, are well aware it is going on, and instead of participating, just go and shit on the outcome. I know people are busy, but… c’mon. At least be constructive, like Bryan. Thanks, Bryan. :)
On a more constructive note of my own, I’ve checked in the tiny little bit of microtinder work I once did (I’m going to try to get it running again for 2.11, but not any time in the very short-term future) and dumped a big pile of liveCD stuff into CVS too, in livecd-project. Hopefully that’ll help those move forward and proof them against drive crashes and such.
[1] Well, not well-tested, but LDTP + staged dogfooding could in theory alleviate big chunks, if not all, of that problem.