Re: [fw-wiz] MJR on Linux/OSS

From: Marcus J. Ranum (mjr_at_ranum.com)
Date: 03/12/05

  • Next message: Devdas Bhagat: "Re: [fw-wiz] MJR on Linux/OSS" 
    To: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au>, Devdas Bhagat <devdas@dvb.homelinux.org>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 12:42:53 -0500

    Darren Reed wrote:
    >If I was to interpret what Marcus is saying without reading his article,

    If you were to interpret what I am saying WITHOUT reading it,
    you're basically making sh*t up and probably shouldn't, unless
    you want to post it under your own moniker. I and many others
    on this list respect your opinion and would rather hear that
    than your guess as to what my opinion might be. ;)

    >it would be that the look and feel of Windows works and as people have
    >such a high familiarity with it

    Nope. My argument is that it's becoming frighteningly
    difficult to build code that you can reliably install and run
    across Linux distros, let alone Linux/BSD distros. The
    difficulty in building products (not user interfaces) that
    can reliably install cleanly makes it difficult for a vendor
    to support all the distros. Which pushes them towards
    "appliance-izing" the OSS kernels, so they can re-achieve
    a necessary level of control. If you're a vendor selling a
    product on *NIX nowadays you are completely hosed if
    you don't QA on each distro. Which means you need
    a whole room full of waste-of-time. AND you still get
    hosed because some customer uses whatever-server
    instead of blah-server and everything blows up. So by
    being so diverse, the OSS *NIX variants are dooming
    themselves to become embedded appliances or
    evolutionary dead ends.

    What really makes me shake my head in dismay is
    the short-sighted stupidity of the OSS community as
    it now tries to re-converge on a "standard linux distro"
    as if it wasn't ONCE A SINGLE STANDARD DISTRO.
    I remember when there was one BSD and one
    LINUX and it wasn't that long ago. The OSS community
    should have "put all the wood behind one arrow" and
    made that one distro as good as it could possibly
    be, instead of making 200 distros, each of which
    has some great stuff, and some braindamage, and a
    small army of fanatical adherents who throw rocks
    at the other distros on mailing lists. It's pathetic.
    And it sure as hell isn't going to unseat Microsoft.

    mjr.

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