Link of the Day [5.20.08]
Someone fixes a 25 year old bug in the BSD Unix.
“Who cares? I don’t use Unix anyway,” you might say. Sorry, it’s what’s running beneath the pretty Aqua interface of Mac OS X.
It’s a rather trivial bug, very low level and such. Yet, I wonder why it took this long to find a fix. The open source model of software development touts the fact that with the source available to anyone and everyone all bugs are shallow. That is it should take a short time to find a fix. Yet, the bug fix was just submitted recently!
The funny thing is that it was a known bug. Was it reported to code maintainers? There were programs that knew of the BSD problem and created workarounds for it. Somethings wrong with this the BSD development to let this go untouched for so long.
http://osnews.com/story/19731/The-25-Year-Old-UNIX-Bug
