[Gllug] Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[Peter Childs]

Bruce Richardson wrote:

>The author has a good point, in that traditional packaging schemes don't
>allow for user-installed software.   Users on *nix systems have
>traditionally simply unrolled tarballs into their own ~/src directories,
>compiled them and installed them into their own ~/bin directories.  A
>packaging system that addresses the same needs would be interesting.
>Beyond that, however, his argument is specious.  The most misleading
>part of it is the title, "Zero Install".  This is intended to imply no
>installation overhead, no administration overhead and that is simply not
>true.   The admin tasks have simply been moved from the sysadmin to the
>user.
>  
>
   
    Part of the problem is separation between "service" and 
"application". On windows everything is an application so even when you 
need a service (like a web server or email service) you get a user 
application which quite frankly looks like one.
    So to trying to improve things when people are providing a service 
(like a bank database) they use a app written on a web based service, no 
point in reinventing the wheel. But the web service also provides the 
appliciation for accessing the service which does not work very well. Hmm
    What should be happerning is a custom built application to access 
the service providing the data. So postgres or MySql stores your data 
and the user uses there application to access the data.
    Applications like Word, Excel, OpenOffice, Mozillia, Gimp do just 
work but they rely on sevices like Smb (provided by Samba or Windows), 
HTTP (provided by Apache etc), SMTP/Pop3 (provided by exchange, sendmail 
etc) which don't just work and do need a admin to look after them.
    I've spent 3 days this week chasing several windows virus  that some 
was trying to blame on my Linux based fire wall (which is not as secure 
as it might be) in the end I resolved it down to one pirated 
applications CD. It had spread to every windows PC in the entire office 
via Smb.  So  Microsoft by not being open  make it an offence to be 
open  and  Open ends up being somthing virus writers and priraters  do 
which gives us open good developers a bad press.

Peter Childs

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