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in reply to Re^3: Make it good
in thread Make it good

In my experience, Linux (for example) is at least a lot closer to meeting every one of those goals than Windows. Obviously, these criteria are somewhat subjective in real-world application, but if you use either Linux or Windows as a basis for comparison, the other falls short of (in the case of Windows compared to Linux) or admirably meets (in the case of Linux compared to Windows) those goals.

Granted, I don't know enough about the code in the Linux kernel to be able to comment particularly on its reusability and readability, but the fact that it's open source makes it reusable and readable, even if only with difficulty, while the closed source status of the Windows kernel makes it unreusable and unreadable — to say nothing of the fact that it's such a bloated, crufty collection of layered kludges that I have a hard time imagining pieces of its code being terribly reusable or readable, anyway.

- apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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Re^5: Make it good
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 19, 2004 at 14:59 UTC
    Don't redefine the terms. The OP was talking about reusable code in terms of software engineering - not about about licensing issues. perl is open source, but it's not very readable or reusable. And I've seen a lot of code that's both readable and reusable according to the definitions the OP gave, but which isn't open source.
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