Bruce Perens -- Bake-off proposal

May 7, 1999

Instead of griping over this mindcraft benchmark, let's hold a bake-off at LinuxWorld in August.

We will challenge NT and Linux developers to each field teams to compete at LinuxWorld. The two teams get identical hardware provided by a non-competing third-party: Dell, IBM, whoever. The NT team and the Linux team have a day or two to bootstrap their systems and tune them. Then they compete on a number of issues. Besides how fast they can serve, etc., let's make rapid application development one of the issues too. Each team could be handed a list of tasks to develop using their respective environments, and could be judged on time to completion, bugginess, features and elegance, speed, etc. Cover it with live webcasts, etc.

It's sort of like Deep Blue vs. Kasparov. You win on the publicity front even if you lose.

Pass this on to anyone you like if you think it's interesting.

Thanks

Bruce Perens

23:17:13