22 Feb
2006
22 Feb
'06
2 a.m.
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 00:46, Lee Revell wrote:
On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 06:40 +0100, Cesare Marilungo
wrote:
Unforch, the sheeple aren't impressed by technical merits, only in
lowest common denominator usability. We're coming along in that
department I believe, but after puttin OOo on a friends winderz box and
his having a heck of a time recovering his financial data from the
default settings, I will not do that again until he asks.
Ok, let's try to take the problem from
another direction.
What do you think is the reason some talented coders and some
influential thinkers are putting a lot of efforts into writing and
maintaining open source software if it is not the belief that
sharing knowledge, solutions, tools and such is the way to go?
Why Paul Davis started writing Jack and Ardour instead of writing
another commercial DAW and then try to sell it to a publisher?
Because they choose to do so. It is equally legitimate to choose to
develop proprietary software. I happen to believe that in the long
run open source will prevail over proprietary solutions on its
technical merits. Just because we believe that open source is a better
model, does not
entitle us to force that on everyone.
Exactly, Lee. We can quietly evangelize a bit, and when their box falls
prey to the latest winderz exploit, we can sympathize and comment that
it didn't bother my systems in the least, but we cannot in good
concience insist that they change to linux without being willing to
take over maintainance on that box for the 2-4 years it will take while
they learn linux.
Particularly when linux is such a moving target even for those of us who
*think* they are smart enough to run it.
And of course all that isn't worth a bucket of warm spit when an
important to a business web server gets rooted, and it was running
linux. It just happened to a friend of mine from all the symptoms he
is reporting today. The PHP worm I think.
Lee
--
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.