OT: Question re: SCO Use

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: <filepro-list at celestial.com>
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 11:39 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Question re: SCO Use


> On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 06:01:22PM -0400, Transpower, the prominent 
> pundit,
> witicized:
>> Tim:  SCO OpenSever is very stable and has a very beautiful, easy-to-use
>> interface--much better, in my opinion, than FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, or
>> Solaris.  I do agree with you that SCO's financial situation appears to
>
> Which linux were you using?  It's all relative.  SuSE's YaST blows OSR's
> scoconfig out of the water in terms of usability, stability, and easy of
> use.  RH's 'setup' pretty much blows chunks, to use the vernacular,
> although I still prefer it to scoconfig--at least 'setup' and its module
> never actually crashed on me repeatedly like scoconfig does.

Look, you must really try harder to acknowledge that your one persons 
experience is just that.
And not exactly unbiased either.

Just because something is free doesn't make it holy. It's desirability over 
other similar products extends little further than the simple fact that it's 
free. A desireable feature to be sure, but only one of many and far from the 
most important factor that a responsible person should be concerned with. 
Sometimes to hear some of the more fervent advocates base so much of their 
argument on the simple freeness (free as in beer, even though the software 
is also free as in speech) It's like hearing someone trying to say one 
product is better because it's box has a cooler logo. It may or may not 
actually be "good" and whatever it is today, it may or may not be the same 
tomorrow.

I have been keeping my toes in the linux water all along, wating for the 
time when I see linux being as stable as sco, or at least stable enough. 
(And I only mean for our needs so just bottle the banal remarks)
Yast is no better than anything else, and scoadmin is no worse than anything 
else. They both have things they do better than any other thing out there, 
and they both fall flat on their ass in some places.

As it happens, up until a couple weeks ago I was running suse 9.1 / 9.2 on 
my desk workstation, a respectable dual p3 1G that never had a hardware 
problem.
Yast gradually brought that box to a smoking ruin trying to resolve 
dependancies while installing new packages and doing the on-line updates. It 
had the stupid, and yet all too common, situation of circular dependancies, 
or circular incompatibilities which deadlocked certin upgrades from being 
possible unless you closed your eyes and told it to force something and then 
just see what breaks.
I wasn't even using the thing all that hard. Mostly web browser and ssh 
sessions. occasionally some graphics work playing with cups print system.

It became impossible to deal with the system any more. Enough things became 
broken that I couldn't use the box any more and yast or some pkg database 
was too screwed up to recover, and I had to wipe the box. Just as a test, I 
did manage to return to 90% functionality by putting in a 9.2 install dvd 
and telling yast to upgrade every istalled package and ignore all 
dependancies. So if the box were a server it wouldn't have been utterly 
hopeless. I wouldn't have been so fast & loose with yast in the first place 
on a server, ahh but in the worl of linux you often have no choice...

Probably a seasoned suse user would know the little unwritten no-no's and 
gotcha's and could avoid that by making the right choice at various stages 
based on a learned "feel for it" and not always on anything visible on the 
screen that a new user could have any hope to get right except the hard way. 
I concede the exact same thing for custom & scoadmin. I never have a problm 
with it, find it 1000% more predictable and SAFE to operate, and readily 
admit it's only partly because it actually is robust and safe, and partly 
because I'm just a seasoned sco user.

In our case, yes, we still ship new sco boxes. Why? I've said it many times. 
Because when we install a sco box, everything "just works" and it's almost 
the same today as it was 15 years ago.
That is not a lack of progress, that is a result of the understanding about 
how to progress in a sane manner. An understanding that chopping off your 
legs and growing new ones every few months or years is not the best way for 
everyone to become better runners. It's a valid form of progress, but 
generally only useful in an r&d lab not in production.

Also, because linux is developed mostly (not anything like exclusively 
anymore, but still mostly) by people in their free time, for free, no one is 
obligated to do any particular thing. No one is obligated to protect 
interfaces from breaking installed apps. No one is obligated to fix a 
particular bug. Life with linux is fine as long as you are ok with riding 
the wave and staying in the sweet spot of popular development. Only use apps 
that lot's of other people use, only use hardware that lot's of other people 
use. Don't count on any particular thing too much. Don't invest too much 
effort in any particular thing because in a year it may be unsupported as 
the crowd has moved on to something else.

There are lot's of commercial endeavors that can play along by those rules. 
There are lot's that can't tolerate that kind of thing at all.
It's not for you to say otherwise. You know what you know, and you don't 
know everything else. Me too. That's why I don't pesume to tell you you are 
stupid or irresponsible or unethical or focused on the wrong factors for 
using linux. Kindly accord others the respect they accord you.

Is my head in the sand? No. I am always trying out at least 1 or 2 versions 
of linux and have been using freebsd for the last few years and I'll both 
recognize when the conditions are right for me to jump ship, if they ever 
are, and know just what I'm going to jump to when I do. I won't be 
scrambling, cought off guard, and none of my customers will be guinea pigs.

Also, if you have me /dev/nulled, that's fine. Thats' probably best for all 
of us. But if you are going to resort to such a crutch, at least have the 
strength of character to carry through and do it all the way. Doesn't 
ignoring me kind of obligate you to refrain from talking about me also?
Seems pretty cowardly to hide behind your junk filter and not have to hear 
me or hear my side of a debate and yet you get to speak to me and about me 
and push your side of a debate.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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