Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: MJR on Linux/OSS
From: "Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>
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. _______________________________________________ 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)