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The Third Annual Southern California Linux Expo

Larry McVoy

Larry McVoy is founder and CEO of BitMover, Inc. He has worked in the software industry since 1987 on operating systems, clusters, networking, systems performance and developer tools. He is the creator of a popular portable benchmarking suite, LMbench. McVoy is perhaps best known as the creator of BitKeeper, a distributed configuration management tool used both commercially and for major open source projects such as the Linux kernel and the MySQL database. He has worked at Sun, SGI, Cobalt and Google prior to founding BitMover. He also lectured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University. Mr McVoy holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Abstract

The Delta Development Model is a new method of software development which merges the best practices from both the open source and the commercial development worlds. This model combines the time-to-market goals of commercial development with the quality requirements of open source development. The Delta Development Model model, as implemented with BitKeeper, has been credited with more than doubling the pace of the Linux kernel development.

Commercial and open source development efforts have different pressures. Commercial tends to be more focused on time to market and open source tends to be more focused on peer review and code quality. Both models have strengths and weaknesses, neither is "best". Conventional wisdom has been that you needed to choose one or the other. BitKeeper has proven this is no longer true and that you can enjoy the benefits of both.

Mr McVoy will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different development tools and further describe why only a distributed peer-to-peer system, such as BitKeeper, can enable the Delta Development Model. The Linux kernel will be used as a vehicle to present the models, their evolution, and the resulting productivity that you can gain by employing the Delta Development Model in your projects.

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