[Cumbria] Re: All that flamefestery

[Michael Saunders]

Lo all!

Some of you may know me, some not, and some would probably never want to
know me. I'm an LXF writer living in Ye Olde Market Towne of Ulverston,
and I'm Chris Plant's hero. At least that's what he says.

Anyway, to dive headfirst into the fray:

Ken quipped:
>
> Why should Red Hat 'b*****' about with KDE and Gnome when the rest of
> the Linux fraternity concentrates on getting the distro right? Probably
> for selfish (commercial) reasons.  I believe that if this attitude
> proliferates we'll end up with a lot of different versions of Linux
> (etc) as happened to Unix.

Well, we won't see anything like the same kind of fragmentation that
afflicted commercial Unices many moons ago simply due to the licensing.  
Forks happen, people split off separate projects, but ultimately there's a
kind of software Darwninism in place -- thanks to the GPL, if somebody
adds something great, it'll trickle into the other projects too.

As for Red Hat, many people see them as being overly commercial but as
others have suggested they need to retain a strong corporate image to
continue their sales. Despite the impression many get, RH make pretty much
diddly-squat from selling shrinkwrapped boxed-sets -- their dough comes
from huge support contracts to megacorps like Shell etc.

There's validity in the argument that RH isn't being entirely fair to KDE
in their latest release (go on Chris, flame away!) but as a company
they've been good for the free software community -- even RMS has said so.  
By funding GCC, glibc, GNOME etc. development they deserve respect.

Chris uttered:
>
> And RedHat can't be that buggy, because it consistant gets good reviews.

Apart from RH 7.0's slightly problematic release... But I do agree with
the jist of your argument. RH's .0 jobs tend to be a proving ground for
new tech, like the hybrid desktop in the latest, and it's not wise to
commit to it straight away. Fortunately their support is second to none
and updated errata packages are usually available hours after any serious
problems are discovered.

As for YaST -- it's a love/hate thing really. Personally I prefer to just
get my hands dirty in the raw config files, but YaST has attempted to
accomplish something few other Linux admin tools have: be a one-stop
solution. LinuxConf was glitchy and limited, and not tried Webmin for a
while (but it looks decent). So YaST may have its flaws but as a central
point of configuration, for those who don't know the ins-and-outs of the
system, it's respectable.

Right, EOT. :)

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk