Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.
In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.
As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.
Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.
In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.
Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.
I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.
