OSS Unix: Dividing & Conquering Itself

(Score.5, Interestin writes "Security guru Marcus Ranum has some interesting thoughts about how a continuing lack of consistency among Unix systems (and particularly Linux) is hurting Linux (and remaining commercial Unix vendors like Sun) and helping Microsoft. Admittedly this has been said before, but no-one else quite manages to phrase things the way Marcus can."

Comments

All I can say...

[tabkey12]

http://www.olene.net/linux.html

The article is dated...

[mmThe1]

"Salt Lake City Airport, Dec 4, 2005" (look at the bottom of the page)

hm, slashdot editors -- for once you've repeated news from future!

Only partially correct

[couch_warrior]

You missed an important point in your rant.
It isn't just that Linux/free BSD adherents are squabbling children. NO, NO, NO. They are squabbling adherents of a religious cult. In particular, the cult of UNIX. These people are cut from the same cloth as the old mainframe system operators. They believe that it is MORALLY WRONG for a computr system to be easy to use. Why write a GUI that lets a user choose from a scrollable list of options, when you can make them use a command line interface where they have to memorize the syntax of 25 option flags. If you make it easy to use, the commercial value of memorizing command options evaporates, and they might have to get REAL jobs. And if helpful souls corrupt your favorite open source package by creating GUI tools to configure and run it - rewrite the applicaiton to break all the GUI tools! The only reason for having a GUI on Linux at all is to seduce Windows users into trying Linux, knowing full well that to get anywhere they will HAVE to learn the CLI -bwahahahahahaha! I have been a faithful Linux devotee for 8 years, and with about every second release, my window manager changes, requiring me to relearn all the configuration settings, or the multimedia viewer I had been using gets dropped, and I have to reinstall it by hand from tarballs, or the CD burner software disappears and I have to find an alternate.
I will never stop loving or using Linux, BUT, for heavens sake guys, GET RID OF THE CLI, and STOP REINVENTING THE WHEEL!
Repeat after me - "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters","Ease of use is all that matters", ...