Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Restrictively patented software may, in your and many others'
opinion, still be Free; I my opinion, it's not. It may be FOSS, but
it isn't Free in the most pure sense of the word; If I can't share
what I use, freely, with someone else just because there so happens
to be an ocean in between and my buddy is living in the states; that
to me isn't free.
But surprisingly, nobody makes any effort to share the burden of
system administration, which is why so few people use unix-like
systems and why there are endless discussions like this of what
packages should and shouldn't be installed or bundled in some small
set of configuration choices that aren't going to fit everyone or be
exactly right for any purpose.
I'm sorry, you should not have read "If I can't share what I use" as:
"If I cannot publish a list of my installed software and their settings"
rather then
"I'm using something that is free here, but once I start using it
elsewhere it may be illegal or I might get sued."
My take on it is that there is a lot of work that can be shared with no
legal interference and no one bothers to do it. Why not solve the
problem that can be solved easily first?
What we really need is a push-button way for anyone who thinks they
have built a system that is well configured for some particular use to
publish his installed package list - and perhaps add a repository in
the odd case that he needed something not in the usual repositories.
Then anyone else should be able to read through the descriptions of
the purposes for these configurations and why the admin that created
them believes his setup is the best, pick one, and automatically get
the same set of packages installed on his own computer - and
periodically repeat to track the updates. This would eliminate about
90% of the reasons for having multiple distributions with confusing
differences and give the effect of having an expert system
administrator tuning each installation for its intended use.
If you're gonna build profiles of what software is suited for what
purpose, along with the ideal settings, I'm curious what a user would
think of a 3-million-profiles-website he can choose the most fit profile
from.
It's approximately the same problem as deciding what song to listen to,
or what news story to read next, something people do all the time, and
more useful than wading through the gazillion different distributions on
distrowatch, each trying to be a general purpose solution not really
matched to any specific use. I doubt if there are 3 million people
arrogant enough to call themselves experts, though. There are probably
a few hundred configurations that an expert sysadmin would build for 99%
of uses and the good ones would sort themselves out by reputation and be
improved by user feedback. The base distribution could then just
concentrate on getting all the programs into a repository and keeping
their interfaces compatible so you didn't have to throw everything out
to update.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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