On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 12:08 -0500, Sean wrote: > On Wed, December 8, 2004 10:44 am, Sean Middleditch said: > > [snip] > > Sean, > > You seem to want the entire Linux world to Just Get Along[tm] and have > everyone play by the same rules so that proprietary app vendors lives > would > be a little easier. But there is no way to impose such a solution across > the entire spectrum. Stop there. You seem hung up on the proprietary app stuff. I think I've made it as clear as I can that *Open Source* apps are hurt too. In fact, I haven't had any problems installing proprietary apps here at work. It's the third party open source apps that are a pain. > > The truth is, the Linux development model is messy with diverse groups of > developers in a wild web of cooperation and competition. This model is > incredibly powerful and has created the huge success that we have today. > The fact that there are some interoperability issues is hardly surprising, > but their resolution is usually not really that difficult. Right. That's my whole point. Resolution is not really that difficult. So why are you arguing against the simple resolution? > > Nobody is _ever_ going to get all the people involved in Linux to agree to > anything. The beauty of open source is, you don't have to get people to > agree, you have the power to do what you want. > > Perhaps you'll have some luck convincing RedHat to include every library > ever developed for ever. But i'm not sure the demand for it is as great > as you think. Nor would it help on other distributions that refuse to > implement that plan. That is *not* what I've asked for. I've made it rather clear that I think that Red Hat even *trying* to provide tons of software is goofy. Centralization, as I've said, is *NOT* the answer and never will be. > > Sticking with a long lived distribution really does minimize the problems > for users. As for proprietary application vendors, the burden imposed by > the Linux landscape really isn't insurmountable. They have a number of > options on how to provide their products. It's not the vendors I'm worried about. It's the users. Or even the Open Source developers. Every hour that I spend dealing with some stupid breakage is an hour that I *could* have spent writing code. Or, heck, out with friends or family or whatever. Maybe that list of "cool projects I want to do but haven't yet" would be a bit smaller if it didn't take hours to get a simple actively maintained open source app installed because it's dependencies conflict left and right due to poor packaging and/or poor library interface management. This argument is getting close to going in circles. Do you have any actual arguments against anything I've proposed or asked for? I haven't actually seen one yet... -- Sean Middleditch <elanthis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.
