[Sussex] Microsoft fails to comply

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

Steve Dobson wrote:

>4). The F/OSS movement, despite (or maybe I should say "because of") it
>    having no leader, is now the most powerful software process on 
>    the planet.  It has been proved that it can produced code which is
>    much more stable, bug free, and well designed code.  It betters 
>    all formal design methods!!!
>  
>
Most, not all.

The one formal design method that can be clearly demonstrated to be 
better was the one that INMOS used for the transputer and OCCAM.

This used a technique of formal mathematical modelling, denotational 
semantics, and proof theory to build a chip (the T8000 transputer) that 
could be properly demonstrated to be completely bug-free. (It is my 
understanding that, after 15 years, this is still held to be true and 
no-one has found a bug in the T8000 nor in its Occam compiler.)

The downside of this was that, on inspection, there only approved to be 
about a dozen people in the world who actually understood formal proof 
of parallel algorithms well enough to put this methodology into 
practice. Even some of the key textbooks turned out to have errors in 
them in the more esoteric bits :-) As a result of this, the development 
programme was stopped in the early 90s.


I agree, absolutely, however, that F/OSS is now the most powerful 
software process on the planet. And that it has been clearly 
demonstrated that it can produce code that is stable, bug free and 
well-designed, and that it betters any formal design method that has 
been used by any succesful proprietary vendor.


Mark