[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help with website

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 8:08 PM, Ken Gunderson wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 18:53 -0400, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>> And this continues to miss the point.  This is what is so frustrating to me
>> (going back years...)  Techies like you guys make a decision based on the
>> technical merits, but 95% of the manager/sysadmin types are going to look at
>> the learning curve (and don't bother telling me it doesn't exist or is
>> trivial - maybe in your book, not in theirs), and ask "why on earth do we
>> want to do X when our admins will have to learn all kinds of new crap???"
>> FWIW, if zfsguru was more stable and didn't have a single dev, I would have
>> switched to it in a heartbeat.  I know my way around most linuxes (and even
>> freebsd) in my sleep, but honestly, it's beyond frustrating to find out that
>> there is no obvious way to do the /etc/rc.local thing I kvetched about
>> earlier (or an alternative, to put an entry in the crontab with '@reboot',
>> oh wait, the opensolaris cron doesn't support that feature...)  And yes, I
>> know none of these things are killers in themselves, it's the death of a
>> thousand cuts.  Folks, I *want* opensolaris in some flavor to prosper, but
>> when I hear evangelists complaining about "why should we make this MORE like
>> linux, etc..."  The answer "SO PEOPLE WILL USE IT?!"  Sorry, I'm tired and
>> out of sorts, and I saw freebsd lose this battle to linux years ago with the
>> same short-sighted attitude and now it's happening again with OS (btw, does
>> anyone have a comment about nexenta providing debian userland tools like
>> apt?)
> 
> FreeBSD "loosing" any battle is debatable.  I do feel compelled to point
> out, however, that Linus himself has said that if not for the legal
> battle that was waging between att and uc regents at the time, he would
> have just used bsd.  Linux later experienced, and survived, some legal
> wrangling of its own.
> 
> Plenty of people use FreeBSD.  And OpenBSD.  Often w/o knowing as as
> they silently pass/filter packets, server up smtp, http, etc. That these
> desktop users are not running these platforms on their peecee's does
> mean that they don't still use them extensively as they move about the
> Internet.  And I guess it is equally frustrating and exasperating that
> some continue to just not get this. 
> 
> Peace :_)

I know my Ricoh printer is based on one of the BSDs (not sure which).  Mostly I like the idea of the BSD license, which can accommodate open source or proprietary with equal ease.  However, Ricoh carries the notion of a black box unless you've got megabucks well past the point where it does them any good, IMO.  So although I despise the whole GNU ideology thing, there are times when it seems worthwhile that it exists as an alternative, if only to whack folks with.