Re: Hardware vs Software RAID

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> the key thing to do is to ensure you have good testing infrastructure in
> place to check that things will work before you deploy to production.

This is true whether you're using Linux or completely closed source
software. There are two main differences from my view:

-OSS software lets you look at the code before a typical closed-source
company would have pushed a product out the door at all. Downside is that
you need to recognize that. Linux kernels for example need significant
amounts of encouters with the real world after release before they're
ready for most people.

-If your OSS program doesn't work, you can potentially find the problem
yourself. I find that I don't fix issues when I come across them very
much, but being able to browse the source code for something that isn't
working frequently makes it easier to understand what's going on as part
of troubleshooting.

It's not like closed source software doesn't have the same kinds of bugs.
The way commercial software (and projects like PostgreSQL) get organized
into a smaller number of official releases tends to focus the QA process a
bit better though, so that regular customers don't see as many rough
edges. Linux used to do a decent job of this with their development vs.
stable kernels, which I really miss. Unfortunately there's just not
enough time for the top-level developers to manage that while still
keeping up with the pace needed just for new work. Sorting out which are
the stable kernel releases seems to have become the job of the
distributors (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, etc.) instead of the core kernel
developers.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD