[svlug] A little on Open Source Philosophy...

[Don Marti]

On Thu, Nov 12, 1998 at 04:01:45PM -0800, Gies, Dennis wrote:

> My manager used this as an example: writing a small C program that
> uses the internet .DLLs in Windows (standard or service pack, I
> don't know) that went out and got a page of stock quotes and then
> parsed them.

I'll race him.  Give us each an identical buck-naked box with a net
connection and whatever commercially available software on CD we
choose (I choose a Linux distribution and Perl, but he can have all
the Microsoft tools he wants.)

The race will be open-book, open-net, and open-support -- you can use
any documentation, download anything (except the race-winning program
itself, of course) and ask any questions of any phone or online
support forum, _including_ any level of Microsoft tech support.

The winner of the race will be he who first installs the OS, web
server, and development tools and writes a program that does the
following: (1) fetches the stock quotes and (2) creates a new
dynamically generated web page based on the information obtained.  The
specific task to do will be left for the judges to assign on race day.

All we need is a panel of judges to assign us the task and say go, and
a venue.  Perhaps it would be fair to get the space from one side and
the hardware from the other -- what if Microsoft let us use their new
developer center in Palo Alto, and VA Research would loan two
identical boxes with hardware known to be supported both under Linux
and Microsoft Windows.

Loser has to use the winner's favorite OS two hours a day for two
months.

-- 
Don Marti                                       Electric Lichen L.L.C.
whois DM683                                 -rwxr--r-- Harrison Street
dmarti at electriclichen.com                San Francisco, California USA

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