The open source release of the Second Life viewer program by developer Linden Lab offers a rare opportunity to peer into the comparative strengths of closed and open source development models. This article, the first in a series, gives an overview of some of the differences between these development styles, and talks about what's involved in setting up your own build environment.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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