Trusting operating systems: vendor or university?

[Greg Limes]

BEFORE launching into this, I would like to reiterate the standard
disclaimer: I do not speak for Sun. Please bear this in mind. I speak
for myself, and sometimes I may see things as I would like them to be,
instead of as they really are. So what is new?

For those of you who just tuned in:

In article <1128 at mcgill-vision.UUCP> der Mouse writes:
>I trust [an os] written by a company out to make money even less.

In article <55239 at sun.uucp> limes at sun.uucp (Thats Me!) writes:
>If the operating system does not work properly, the company gets
>bug reports and has to fix them

In article <1133 at mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) answers
>They do?  In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports. ...
>my notion of fixing a bug involves getting a fix to the person with
>the problem within a week.

In article <11812 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>(or at least a `hm, yes, that is a bug/ no, that is a feature | here
>is a workaround | we have no idea how to fix it yet but we are working
>on it', not dead silence: we can get dead silence from Berkeley for
>free :-) )
>
>My own experience agrees with that of der Mouse, and applies to hardware
>vendors as well as software (viz. Emulex).  Bug reports never get any
>answer, though the bugs do sometimes get fixed.  Why should I pay for
>this `service' when UCB CSRG operates more or less the same way?  And in
>their case the silence is excusable (CSRG can be described as `five guys
>weilding source code', and there is no one left to answer bug reports).

AND, in this article, I respond ...

Folks, fixing bugs and getting the fixes out the door is not as
trivial as some of you seem to think, and Sun is not as overstaffed as
some others may think. My *entire* job consists of reading bug
reports and trying to fix the problems described in them. I try to
form an evaluation relatively quickly -- this is what Chris is asking
about -- and it was my assumption that this evaluation was being
forwarded to everyone who needed to know it, including the customer.

As for sending a quick patch to the customer who called it in, see
Doug Gwyn's article <8013 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, and consider the meaning of
the phrase "extreme emergency".

-- Greg Limes [limes at sun.com]