First of all let me say thank you to everyone who shared ideas. it has been very helpful.
OK. Let me play Devil's Advocate for a minute. These are a couple of reasons I have actually heard for why it is better to use proprietary software:
1. I realize the source is available, but I want my developers developing OUR software not OS (Fill in your other FOSS software here) software.
2. If I buy a piece of software that is closed-source, the company selling it to me has to support it. If something is wrong with it, they'll fix it, because that's where they make their money.
3. If I buy [closed-source company]'s software I know it will work with their Database, Mail server, Office Suite, etc. because it is made by the same company. I'm not sure that we'll be able to get [open-source company]'s software to talk to our existing infrastructure, our to our partner's existing infrastructure.
Now I know what I think of these problems, but I am fairly new (less than 3 years of using *NIX) and I want to see what the community thinks. Thanks again for all the replies.
Cheers
On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 22:43 -0500, Monty J. Harder wrote:
On 10/8/07, cragos@gmail.com cragos@gmail.com wrote:
These two are related in the *NIX mentality that incubated the development of the BSDs and Linux:
8: Tendencies towards standards compliance and openness in the FOSS community make it far more likely that related projects will be able to effectively and efficiently interact. 10: (More a plus for *NIX than FOSS) Having more mature command line interfaces than are available in pre-Win2k7 builds of Windows Server substantially cut the amount of time needed to populate changes across multiple servers.The Windows people have completely adopted the "GUI=User Friendly, CLI=Unfriendly" meme to the point where they don't recognize the power of the CLI and text files, which are at the heart of the Tao of Unix. I routinely compose "recipes" of Bourne shell commands that expedite configuring a *nix server in a certain way, and share them with my co-workers. With those recipes, they can quickly apply a fix to establish a consistent state on the target machine. Explaining how to do the same thing in a GUI can take several pages.
Given a system that can be configured entirely with text files and command lines, we can build "friendly" GUIs for the newbs, but it's not always so easy to go the other direction.
Just for an example, whenever I boot my laptop into Windows, the sound settings are not what I left them at when Windows last shut down. Every freaking time I have to open up the Control Panel Sounds and Audio applet, click on Advanced in the Device volume section, and re-adjust the sliders to what I want. This is going backwards. My very first sound card when I ran DOS had a command I could include in AUTOEXEC.BAT to set the card up the way I wanted, and I could also put commands in the batch files that launched various apps to reconfigure the thing to my preferences for that app.
The entire point of a computer is to automate repetitive tasks. "Point and grunt" is hardly as sophisticated as actual words.
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