* On 08/05/06 22:15 -0700, Fred Harris wrote: | It's getting to be a very big problem with open source software. | Andrew Morton who's the lead maintainer of the Linux production | kernel has come out claiming that the kernel is getting too buggy. | You may not call changing the name of a dependency a bug, but it | certainly manifests itself as one. In the FreeBSD world, such complaints cannot be heard because the development teams are tightly controlled ;) | MS desktop clients update themselves pretty seemlessly. Servers | are getting to that level pretty quickly as well. I'm fighting | an uphill battle trying convince my clients and peers to adopt | open source software and they ask me why? Software that updates | itself verses surely Linux hacks who put people down because they | don't want to follow a complex 20 step process that's documented | in 15 different places. Don't make life difficult for them if you have the budget to run Windows. I must say it's pretty easy to run Windows, my only concerns being the security. Let the guys enjoy the easier, insecure life ;) | There's only a limited amount of space for various open source | applications. They're pretty much commercial ventures now. | There's a big push among packages like Fedora and Debian to | virtualize installations with seemless state archival, recovery, | and transitions. I suppose that may be more of an issue for the | packager than the software developer. I predict that the packages | that seemlessly update state across versions will be the only ones | that exist in the future. I disagree. It's not logical to let that thing called "seamless upgrade" happen, especially on a critical box. For example, Microsoft does not recommend that you enable "Automatic Updates" on servers. Do you know that? Why would you want that to happen to Unix servers? | I guess administrators can make themselves feel important and | smart by spending days messing with an update that should really | only take a couple of hours, or maybe not even that long. Well, those administrators who have all the time at hand and who fear for their jobs would do that. In their conscience, I wonder if they will feel important doing "nothing", as that is exactly what they will be doing. -Wash http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html DISCLAIMER: See http://www.wananchi.com/bms/terms.php -- +======================================================================+ |\ _,,,---,,_ | Odhiambo Washington <wash@wananchi.com> Zzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ | Wananchi Online Ltd. www.wananchi.com |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-'| Tel: +254 20 313985-9 +254 20 313922 '---''(_/--' `-'\_) | GSM: +254 722 743223 +254 733 744121 +======================================================================+ Age before beauty; and pearls before swine. -- Dorothy Parker