<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html style="direction: ltr;">
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body style="direction: ltr;" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Hi,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">To put it short: I
never was much into the ideals of freedom. My preference of free
software always was because I could alter it to meet my own needs. It
was easy enough to do for real. And I had this feeling that the system
was meant to be hacked. It belonged to me. And that's fading away, most
likely because nobody really seems to care about this. Linux is
becoming a piece of opaque spaghetti, but it's OK as long as yum this
or apt-get that trades one bug for another. Spaghetti is not free
software. Not in any sense.<br>
</p>
<br>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Shachar Raindel wrote:</p>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTinn40o9Gf27FVY=cL1c+_VD6Bn32K67bv+sovSp@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite"><br>
<pre wrap=""><!---->And for both issues, if you were a company and not a home user, the
risks of replacing a major software component with a version that
haven't been tested and properly integrated with the rest of the
system would have been far worse than the risks of "root on NFS
through initrd" and "small part of my hardware isn't supported by an
extremely outdated system".
</pre>
</blockquote>
Ah, that's my point. I clearly remember playing around with my kernel,
upgrading it with a gap of several years with a vanilla kernel, and
guess what? I just booted and all was OK. Would you believe that? When
did it become so scary make changes in the kernel? And even worse: Why
do we accept this? What's the practical difference between Window's
kernel and Linux' if you can't compile one, but don't dare to compile
the other?<br>
<br>
There are many kind of companies. My experience with companies, in
particular large ones, is that they put stability before anything. If
you have 1000 running stations out there, the last thing to do is to
just upgrade everything in one go. The worst nightmare is some rare bug
which suddenly knocks your entire infrastructure down (Cellcom,
anyone?). Justified or not, large companies tend to stick to what they
got for as long as possible. I mean, a lot of end-user terminals still
emulate DOS-like screens in a window (Israeli railways? Banks?),
because they stick to the interface they had 20 years ago.<br>
<br>
When small glitches mean big money, the top priorities are stability
and control. Stability means to patch only what you need changed.
Control means that you know what you're doing, to the smallest detail.
"yum upgrade" and its apt parallel is losing control completely.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTinn40o9Gf27FVY=cL1c+_VD6Bn32K67bv+sovSp@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite"><br>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Have you tried Ubuntu recently? If I have package X, and I want to
tinker with its source files, all I have to do is:
(...)
</pre>
</blockquote>
Redhat has a similar system. I'm aware of it. It's yet another
expression of the don't-touch-me paradigm. If you have to make a change
in the sources, we'll hold your hands while you're doing it. The build
process can be a piece of spaghetti, you won't understand it, it will
work only on this specific distribution. And of course, if something
fails, you're cooked.<br>
<br>
But why would it fail? Software never fails. It always lives up to
these don't-worry promises that everything will be smooth, and you'll
never need to understand how things work behind the scenes, and
therefore it can be as messy as ever.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTinn40o9Gf27FVY=cL1c+_VD6Bn32K67bv+sovSp@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
How do you find information on the web? Who makes your Shampoo? Who is
providing your Internet connectivity? We are dependent on big
corporations for our everyday life whether you like it or not.
</pre>
</blockquote>
You mean, like Microsoft?<br>
<br>
It looks like I'm the only one who want to throw away all those bells
and whistles and go back to the good old days when you could do violent
things to your OS and it would still run as if nothing happened. Or put
simply: When GNU/Linux was stable as a rock.<br>
<br>
Eli<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Web: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.billauer.co.il">http://www.billauer.co.il</a>
</pre>
</body>
</html>