Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: MJR on Linux/OSS
From: Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 07:57:58 +1100 (EST)
My apologies for not reading your article, I just couldn't believe that you'd have said what someone was claiming you did.
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.
This is the late 1980s, early 1990s all over again where there were a dozen Unixes and all slightly different. Of course many of those who are now responsible for all of the distros having their own personalities never had to deal with that and so weren't there to experience *that* mistake. Posix, etc, went some want to fixing this but unless you want to stick to using a small selection of library functions (and forget gtk), Posix is almost irrelevant.
The difficulty in building products (not user interfaces) that can reliably install cleanly makes it difficult for a vendor to support all the distros.
It's not just APIs, either. Various commands have different quirks on different distros, etc. It's simply ludicrous. It's frustrating to have to deal with. I can get IPFilter working on *a* distro and if I'm lucky the kernel source will be mostly the same on another, never mind the kernel source provided by the distro often not being in a form that builds a new kernel, but I'll still have to write a custom startup script.
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.
Have you got the warehouse of slaves in India, yet ? Because those rooms are going to be way too expensive, if you want a competitive product, if you fill them in any 'western' country. This is the hidden cost of using OSS to build your product - you now need to hire a kernel hacker, someone else to hack on userland, a test engineer, etc, because your applications people don't have the skills or time to waste on it and because of your customisations, you now need to merge all the patches yourself.
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.
It won't happen. There's too much ego at stake.
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.
That's what happens when you have people who can't agree on how XYZ should be done and rather than compromise, they just go off and start their own project with some group of ad-hoc people. This is the dark side of OSS. Darren _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- MJR on Linux/OSS Devdas Bhagat (Mar 09)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Christopher Hicks (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Darren Reed (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Devdas Bhagat (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Frederick M Avolio (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Darren Reed (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS R. DuFresne (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Devdas Bhagat (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS R. DuFresne (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Devdas Bhagat (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 12)
- RE: MJR on Linux/OSS Bruce Smith (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS R. DuFresne (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS R. DuFresne (Mar 12)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS David Lang (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Crispin Cowan (Mar 17)
- Re: MJR on Linux/OSS Marcus J. Ranum (Mar 12)