Sympathy for a journalist?
I have a slight bit of sympathy for a journalist! What's the world coming to?

Article in WIRED is a rare example of proper journalism. Researched the facts, connected things properly, came to a valid conclusion.

Conclusion: Open source is not a good way to run a public utility like the Web. Open source is fine for programs running within single computers, using some of the resources of public utilities.

Basic problem: Serious quality testing has to keep Murphy in the room. Murphy is notoriously distractible and erratic, so this is HARD work.

This takes lots of time and a large set of people with varied skills and talents. Those people have to spend concentrated hours on the task, and they have to set aside their egos. How does this happen? MONEY. You have to PAY managers to keep the varied people on task without exploding, and you have to PAY the varied people enough to compensate for their bruised egos.

Open source provides either (1) no QA at all, or (2) QA by people who share the skills and personality of the original programmer. Murphy isn't in the room.

The WIRED writer didn't hit all of those points, but he did lay out the facts clearly and even-handedly. Good job. And what did he get? Presumably he got money, but he also got some unmerited abuse in the combox from history-impaired techboys. Lots of this crap: "They really just wanted to attract as much as they could with sensationalism, Modern journalism sadly."

No. Sensationalism is the most basic and PROPER skill of journalism. Been there since the Town Crier. It has nothing to do with bias or triviality. If you don't grab eyes and ears, you don't get ANY message across. Complaining about sensationalism is like complaining about the existence of steering wheels when you should be complaining about drunk drivers. But then techboys DO complain about the steering wheel, don't they? See Google's self-driving car.
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