Ports System As A Strategy Against .NET?

proclus writes: "The FreeBSD ports system has been ported to Mac OSX, GNU/Linux, LinuxPPC, and OpenBSD. Check out this descriptive paper and roll your own ports-based distribution." Besides an some informative description of the mechanics of the port system, the paper lays out the case for ports (free and readily available) as a good antidote for .Net and other subscription-based systems.

Comments

Re:Why not wait and see what .NET really is

[glitch!]

Every time Dr. Evil announces that he is working on a new weapon, you folks always assume it is
going to be some orbiting death-ray, a volcano machine, or a bomb that will blow the earth into
little bits. You are always jumping to conclusions...

Maybe this time Dr. Evil is making a weapon that will fight crime and make our streets safe. Or
one that only works against crooked lawyers and politicians. But I repeat myself. Did you even
consider the possibility that Dr. Evil might be trying to be helpful this time? No, you didn't.

Frankly, if I were Dr. Evil, I would be pretty upset with this constant stereotyping. Maybe that
is the cause of his inner anger that causes him to do these things. You are to blame, not him...

Why MS and .NET will win

[joq]

What possible significance could .NET have in such a world, where thousands of free software applications can be readily downloaded and configured especially for you, especially for a computer that is optimized according to your own personal needs and desires and none other? This
is the world where the user operates the distribution building tools, and we now have all of the components at hand, which are required to make this world real.

It's instances like this which will push MS over Unix in the end. " we now have all of the components at hand, which are required to make this world real. " For business that have been using MS based products for years, many have made money using Windows so why would they want to switch when people keep up with the name calling and finger pointing? (re: GPL arguments vs. MS and vice versa)

This week, Microsoft announced that it will work with Corel to port the .NET Common Language Infrastructure and the C# programming language to open-source OS FreeBSD, a Linux competitor. Microsoft submitted the Common Language Infrastructure and C# to the ECMA standards body last October, and the company says that the FreeBSD implementation will be the first on a platform other than Windows. The company believes these tools will be used for academic, research, debugging, and learning purposes on FreeBSD.

For a company so evil, at least they're extending a hand, but according to some this is viewed as MS looking to stir up troubles in the open source community. Maybe so, but how is this comment any different from stirring up the same type of bias "What possible significance could .NET have in such a world, where thousands of free software applications can be readily downloaded and configured especially for you" hasn't anyone ever thought that there are Windows programmers who develop things on their own, post them at sites like Tucows, and are actually happy with using Windows.

All the more power to them, however the community should focus on creating, and making things better, not trying to pick fights. I used FreeBSD at home and Open for my server, and have a laptop with W2K that hasn't been used in eons, and each serve their own purpose, bottom line. Comments and write ups so biased to little to sway my vote of confidence in any OS just because someone claims it to be so much better. No sirs I'll be the judge of that as will most others, so why waste time beating a dead horse. It's these same comments used against the open source community.

Everyone wants to jump in on the action, and post why they're better, and oh by the way here are 30,000 more free programs. Yes 30,000 more free programs, 30,000 more comments, and now the whole concept is lost isn't it. Meanwhile MS stands out because they focus. So please focus on making things better not worse with such biasedness

Simple breakdown

[blakestah]

Ports: suck source and dependent source down across the net, configure for your system, build, install.

Apt-get for Debian: suck binaries down across the net, resolve dependencies, install

All other distros: trying to catch up.

Ports is even a step more fine grained than apt-get, simply because it works with source, and incompatibilities are nearly impossible (the package will refuse to build instead).

Which article did you read?

[Carnage4Life]

I suspect that you didn't read the article at all. Your comments have nothing to do with the article which in turn had nothing to do with .NET. Here's the quote from the article that mentions .NET.

Thus, the FreeBSD ports system, now as a cross-platform, globally distributed, cooperative development and distribution system could form a nexus of user freedom and empowerment. What possible significance could .NET have in such a world, where thousands of free software applications can be readily downloaded and configured especially for you, especially for a computer that is optimized according to your own personal needs and desires and none other?

This somehow implies that being able to quickly download and Open Source applications is somehow in competition with .NET which is about XML web services. It is a thing of particular bemusement to me that Open Source advocates and Slashdot editors keep attacking a .NET which is a figment of their imaginations and has nothing to do with what truly constitutes .NET (which can be gleaned from just reading the .NET website).

On second thought there is one way one might consider that this competes with .NET. The vision of .NET doing all sorts of RPC with XML over HTTP as the protocol to access web services (e.g. obtaining the current headlines on slashdot, stock quotes, perform a translation, or some other interesting web service), the author of the original article may have been trying to say that having access to the multitude of Open Source applications out there makes web services redundant since you could just download an Open Source app to do what the web service does. This is probably true for a subset of web services but things like a realtime flight tracker provided by the airline's website, UPS's package tracker, real time stock quotes, or other information that belongs to a company that you cannot directly access is where web services will shine and simply downloading Open Source apps or various screen scrapers won't cut it.

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