I’ve given-up using Linux.
It’s been about a year now, perhaps slightly longer, for reasons that take a long time to explain the rationale but which in summary are:
- There are too many Linux distributions, and with that diversity has come abject crapness the reason for which is not far removed from my observation that any nerd with a new set of skins for XMMS now considers himself an elite hacker.
- For instance: I like motorcycling, and like to take old, crappy, trashing-them-is-no-great-loss laptops on long vacations with me in order to blog, to store images, and to get network access. There was a time that any Linux would reside happily upon even the smallest of them, but no more. Several distributions are now at least as bulky as (and in fact bulkier than) Solaris but without the cleanliness of package management to permit you to get away with something smaller, if you can get it to run on a 96Mb Pentium-1/133MHz at all, due to driver conflicts on the PCMCIA bus.
- I object to any operating system where a near-Dilbertesque ethical mission statement is the first thing you encounter when you hit their website; it used to be that the code’s quality could sell itself, but now it has to be vegetarian and gluten-free, too.
- The FUD! – the FUD, oh the FUD. So much righteous hot air, so little value after division upon division and fork upon fork of the Integration-Base. Note that I don’t say Code-Base, but instead refer to the aggregate software collection and the effort required to make it all work as a symphony.
…and the list goes on and on.
Of all several Linux operating systems I tried the most painful was Debian Woody which took two weeks of reading maillist archives, trying to recompile drivers on other systems, playing with a painful package-management tool, and generally faffing about without ever quite getting what I needed. Debian was most painful because so many people said it would work, just after tweak after tweak after experiment after kernel recompile and building custom install disks. At least Mandrake just flat-out barfed at the prospect of the Libretto.
In desparation I tried a floppy-based DHCP NetBSD installation, and was stunned to have the basic system up and running in a matter of an hour or so. There’s the difference. I can run NetBSD on old kit, on new kit, and within reason it works the same, and is as functional for my uses as a more bloated Linux would be.
NetBSD is small and still a community, with a small code/integration-base, and a bunch of people integrating a single-ish distribution for several platforms. It’s not popular enough for people to ethically fork it for the sake of a mildly package management system, or so that it can be shipped with a everso-slightly-different-coloured management interface.
So at home I have 2x MacOS, 1x Solaris, 2x NetBSD, a variety of scratch systems, and no regrets. Life is (and software updates are) easier now, and I am far less sympathetic to the “GPL is the one true license, run and hide from anything else” nonsense.
Thus I welcome my friend Steve Usher’s suggestion:
With the GPLv3 on the way and all the Free Software / Open Source ideology battles going on, I think it’s time to write a fundamentalist Free Software license. Obviously the GPL isn’t hard core enough and is far too lenient on the evil proprietary software vendors… so here’s the first draft:The Alpha Pure Ecology License.
- The Software is free to everyone. No-one can charge for it or any work derived from it.
- The source code of The Software must not only be freely given to all those who ask for it but forced upon anyone you meet, even if they have no idea what it’s for. If they refuse it you must continue to pester them until they relent.
- A derived work is determined to be any code written by anyone who has even glanced at the code in passing. The contents of the brain of such a person is classed as a derived work.
- Anyone who has produced or thought of producing derived work will have to release any back catalogue of software written or contributed to by them using this license.
- The Software and any derived work will have the word string “APE/” prepended to its name in recognition that it’s been 0wN3d by this 1337 1Ic3n53 (ed: “elite license”) and is ideologically pure.
- Any company which is the current bogieman as deemed by the population who frequent Slashdot shall be banned from using The Software or any person’s brain who has been tainted by this license as described in provision (3).
- Once The Software has been released under this license it can’t be used with any other license unless it’s a newer and more hard-core version of this license.
…which works for me.
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