Blog: Pete Loshin: Form Follows Function

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Form Follows Function

If you're an operating system zealot--whether you love Linux or militate for Microsoft--you should read this excellent article: A Tale of Four Kernels. You can get the publication details there, the short story is it's published by the ACM, and it's for real.

What's the bottom line? After examining source code of four leading kernels: FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel (WRK), it turns out that:

The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

In other words, the development process chosen is no assurance of software quality. Closed source or open source, it's all good (or not).

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