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It's worth remembering that before Linux (and to some extent Unix) we only had proprietary operating systems from hardware companies - who probably wouldn't hav
by Taniwha 4y ago
It's worth remembering that before Linux (and to some extent Unix) we only had proprietary operating systems from hardware companies - who probably wouldn't have had the resources to find and fix a bug like this, and often customers wouldn't have had access to source to fix it themselves
- cryptonector 4y ago> It's worth remembering that before Linux (and to some extent Unix) we only had proprietary operating systems from hardware companies - who probably wouldn't have had the resources to find and fix a bug like this, and often customers wouldn't have had access to source to fix it themselves UC Berkeley was a hardware company? TIL. Companies like Sun had thousands of engineers working on their operating systems, and they very much could and did find and fix obscure bugs, both on their own as well as based on customer bug reports. Some customers did have access to source code -- I know because I've seen that myself. And customers that didn't have access to source code could still do clever things to diagnose problems. In this case, for example, a packet trace should be enough to diagnose the nature of the bug, though one would indeed need source code to write a fix. Of course it's much better for customers facing obscure bugs to have access to the source code.