Re: MJR on Linux/OSS

["Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>]

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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