Kclug Digest, Vol 39, Issue 9

[leenix]

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 at gmail.com <cragos at 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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