[Coco] Fedora 6 DVD ISO & Linux in General

Roger Merchberger zmerch-coco at 30below.com
Thu May 3 10:59:59 EDT 2007


Rumor has it that John W. Linville may have mentioned these words:
>On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:13:42AM -0400, Rob Rosenbrock wrote:
> > Congratulations! That was very rude!
>
>It is rude to spout ignorant opinions essentially accusing those of
>us who choose linux of being some sort of geek-children.

Now children... Am I gonna hafta turn this car around RIGHT NOW???

> > Uninformed? No. Even the most fanatical Linux websites would be
> > forced to admit that Linux isn't for everyone. There are many programs
> > that are offered Strictly as source code due to the many variations
> > of Linux and the libraries needed.
>
>Your tone is insulting, implying that linux users are all fanatics.
>Have you considered that for many of us linux "just works" and Windows
>"just doesn't"?
>
>Please cite an example of these programs "offered strictly as source".
>Try to make it one that actually has broad appeal.  No doubt there
>are apps available only as source, but only because they are either
>too new to have proved themselves useful or of too limited appeal to
>be worth packaging by the distros.

Bzzzt. Wrong on *all* counts.

qmail.

A few years back, it was the 2nd most used Mail Transport Agent, I 
*believe* it's still the 3rd most popular - both Hotmail (yea, M$ can't 
used their own stuff on that level - it can't handle the load) and Yahoo 
use it, if you want examples of "big companies."

In development for almost 15 years, the source tarball has been unchanged 
in at least 6 years, so it's nowhere near "new" or "cutting edge" software. 
The "license" only allows binary distribution with the permission from the 
author, which he almost never gives.

You're free to distribute tarballs where the _original_ source is untouched 
but can include patches & scripts to roll your own "qmail distro" if you 
wish, but binaries are verboten w/o permission.

Admittedly, it's only useful on a mail server - other "lesser" (heh ;-) MTA 
apps come with distros if you only want to do local or small-scale mail 
delivery.

I've been running qmail for over 10 years now, and I hate the fact that 
distros now *demand* to install an MTA - it makes it harder to "gut" exim 
out of a Linux install to install qmail, than if they'd just leave well 
enough alone for me to compile my own.

Now can we just drop this petty fighting & get back to CoCo stuff???

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers |     Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com          |




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