I followed the link to your home page, and I must say I was impressed.
Nevertheless, I must say you will get only as far as SQL goes, and SQL doesn’t really gives you the full benefits of the relational model. While your ideas are certainly very interesting, they would be potentially even more powerful if they were recast in terms not of SQL tables, but of relations.
IBM DB2 is SQL. While SQL claims to be relational, it isn’t. There are only two faithful implementations of the relational model, one is obsolete, the other is still a beta.
> A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site.
Please do. You may also be interested in some stuff at DMoz Relational Implementations and Model listings... I created these, they have been taken over with no explanations and I could never get back into DMoz, again with now explanations as to why.
> But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.
‘Dubious and impractical’ in which grounds? In fact, it’s hardly dubious because they are the authors and maintainers of the relational model; and it’s not impractical at all because there were already at least two faithful implementations of the relational model already, one currently in beta and other in production usage for twenty years already, not to mention other implementations, partial or not that aren’t perfect but are still more faithful to the model.
> It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution.
The whole point is that SQL is an involution.
> Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?
Yes, as I pointed above. The issue here is that the market has in the eighties taken the ‘safe’ option (IBM SQL/DS) and fell in love with it over the better alternatives, just as it did with MS Windows over Unix and OS/2 in the nineties.
> Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema.
Again that’s a failure in the tools and processes. Even if SQL is fundamentally flawed, if it was really standard integrating all these databases wouldn't be so hard; if it was really distributed it would be a given; if on top of this all these products were properly documented, this job would be almost done already.
Well mr AC, perhaps that’s some kind of joke that makes sense to people with a better command of the English language than mine but I’ll run the risk of asking you to post this photos somewhere.
> He writes that relational databases do not exist. I looked (in the first article) for some support for this startling idea and found only:
You can hardly want to get the whole truth from a single article in a web site while its authors have written several other articles in that web site, and indeed several books about the issue.
If I were to summarize the articles and books that you didn’t care to read, I’d say that SQL never intended to use more than a few basic relational ideas, without ever caring about being faithful to the whole theoretical model. As an analogy you could say that it would be like trying to implement OO without encapsulation: if a model is completely subverted by a product claiming to support it, the claim can’t be considered valid.
> He seems to ignore the real-world considerations that drive data warehousing.
You seem to be reaching conclusions without enough reading. The whole point of relational is that a single database would be able to perform adequately for different applications. That’s impossible with SQL precisely because by subverting the relational model SQL looses many of the advantages the relational model was created to provide. If current databases were relational they would require neither such a beefy hardware to start with, nor such costly programming and conversion procedures.
Also, you fail to distinguish the different meanings of data model, and indeed the goal of data modelling: to make data understandable, logic and accessible. If there are ‘different data models’ in a company, that means already a failure either in the DBMS, or in the data modelling, or both.
including the Web, Byte and others, I’ve written down in Portuguese. I’ve already got a very bad translation into English, am looking for confirmation about the exact relationship between Mach and NT before I do a proper revision of the English version.
> can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism
Microsoft oriented press usually have little regard for jornalistic quality standards, but as far as I remember this article is correct: Prism was the hardware, Mica the OS for Digital’s ‘future system’ that failed, prompting Cutler to go work at Microsoft. Interesting that these ‘future systems’ have a tendency of going seriously wrong: IBM’s gave us SQL instead of relational, and that is worse than Windows!.
Only that he's not really a MBA. He got at least a honoris causa title from Holland, in a move by a business school-mistakenly-turned-University that is regretted by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra at his convocation speech for the graduates of the College of Natural Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin in December 1.996.
I remain faithful to SCSI because of IDE's (ATA's) problems of reliability, not only because SCSI drives are usually better tested but also because ATA's specification is defective.
Is sATA supposed to fix this? Or I will continue to have to shell out the buck to get SCSI reliability and speed?
> I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"
Obviously we’d need MS Windows and MS Office source code to be able to find errors – without that Microsoft will usually just push it to the hardware or other aplications or specific configuration or user errors in the system tested.
> The Vatican owns Great Britain and the United Nations.
Ridiculous assertion, can you back it up? Great Britain is at odds with the Vatican for five hundred years already, and the United Nations actively promote actions contrary to the Vatican like artificial birth control.
> The Catholic religion was started by the Romans.
‘Catholicus’ means ‘universal’ – it’s not a proper name, but simply the expression of the Roman church pretension to be universally dominant. Anyway Romanism is a mixture of Christianity, heresy and Roman political institutions and structures. Nothing is as simple, you should read more than fanatical anti-Romanist tracts.
> The Catholic Church is evil.
Man is evil, Romanism is a human institution, therefore Romanism is evil. Man was created in God’s image, Romanism was created by man, therefore Romanism still has some reflections of God’s image, distorted as it may be. The same holds true to any other religious organization, from Eastern misticism to localist congregational protestant churches, but in varying degrees.
First, one can argue if Romanism is an expression of orthodox Christianity. Second, practicing does not mean orthodox and sincere. Third, try to back your affirmation with some reliable source.
> Religion, traditional family, a return to a glorified past, and fear of the outsiders were all big themes in his rhetoric.
Do you trust a politician’s rhetoric as a measure of his beliefs?
Also, which religion? Whatever his rhetoric, Hitler’s party intended to substitute itself for the Christian church in conquered Europe, especially Germany, Central and Eastern Europe.
> The highest award a Nazi soldier could ever receive was in the shape of a cross.
This would be a German soldier, whose army held some relics of past, including Christian-derived symbols. One one hand, not all Germans were Nazis, to the point of professional officials of the Wehrmacht trying to eliminate the Führer; on the other, the Nazi part had its own armies, the SS and and the SA.
> our civilization was born long before Christ appeared on the scene.
This statement is wrong to the point of uselessness. There isn’t really such a thing as the birth of a civilization, much less with a single simple cause; you’d need to define what you mean by ‘our civilization’ first anyway.
What is usually know as Western Civilization has many roots – the Hebrews; the Classical (Greek and Roman) culture represented by many diverging agents, including secular (Aristoteles) and pious (Socrates, Plato) ones; Jesus Christ; paganism itself; the Roman Law and the Constitution of the city of Rome; and many assorted others.
> While Christianity was not the cause of what happened to the Roman Empire, it was certainly a symptom of it - a simpler, more brutish world view that fit simpler, more brutish times.
Calling Christianity brutish is like calling business men ‘Mafiosi’ – while many brutes call themselves Christian it does not make Christianity condone brute behaviour and beliefs, just as Mafiosi calling themselves businessmen does not make all businessmen Mafiosi.
Calling Christianity simple just shows your ignorance of Christian Theology, Philosophy and Cosmogony.
Calling Christianity a symptom of the end of the Classical Culture shows your total ignorance of causes and effects, as well as timelines – Christianity had its origins much before the end of the Empire, and what eventually took over Europe wasn’t Christianity, but feudal lords who paid lip service to the Roman church which was very substandard Christianity anyway.
As for wars, religion is just one more convenient pretext, and fanatical religion more convenient still; but fanaticism is a failure in how one believes and practices religion, not necessarily a failure in Christianity – unless you define Christianity to be whatever is practice by people who fancy themselves Christians, but that is not a very useful definition.
>> The Christian religion, is one of the primary reasons for the development of Europe to where it is today.
> That's a laughable statement. Development of Europe was held back by an oppressive religious government, and only really started when secularism took hold
First, things aren’t simple as that – there are many and complex causes for both the Middle Ages problems and for Renaissance.
Second, your ‘oppressive religious government’ wasn’t quite Christian, but feudalist – on one side one can argue that the Roman Catholic organization falls short of the Christian standards, and on the other the Roman church itself didn’t always condoned in the acts of feudal lords, even if it seldom questioned Feudalism itself.
Third, you forget the role the Reformation had in the Renaissance.
What’s your definition of a Christian? Hitler would be of Christian cultural heritage, but he neither believed the doctrines nor walked the way, and both are necessary to qualify as a Chistian. Having the cultural heritage makes no one a disciple of Christ – at most it would make one a heretic; to be a Christian one has to believe and practice the orthodox doctrines.
> It was a joke, we got it, you didn't get it fully
He got it, he said it is funny, the statement that it is funny is in the subject line.
> This is a pointless statement. This has no relation whatsoever. Are you recruiting?
The point here is that, contrary to the climate of opinion in may scientifical and technical environments, it is not necessary to be dumb if one’s a Christian.
Christians are always recruiting. In fact, anyone with strong convictions – religious, political, technical – is always recruiting.
He would never be considered a ‘good Catholic’ by any priest... anyway it's recorded in primary sources that the Nazi party intended to become a religion as soon as they won the war. The plans were to confiscate all churches, to either ‘convert’ or incarcerate or kill all priests and pastors, substitute the swastika for the cross and the Mein Kampf for the Bible. Dates related to the Fuhrer and his ascention to power in Germany would substitute for Christmas and Easter.
Look it up.
> In fact, the introduction of Christianity into Europe coincided with an enourmous cultural and economic decline known to us as the Dark Ages.
Not at all. Constantinus introduced a form of state religion based partially on an already decadent distortion of Christian doctrine heavily influenced by popular religion and conditioned by an eclesiastic formal organization closely modelled on the Roman Empire itself. Formal Christianity may be dominant in Europe and America, but its correlation to the original, biblical Christian doctrine is loose at best.
> MS was originally going to upgrade DOS to be Unix like
No I have a write-up about how the original plan was to migrate users to Xenix, a version of AT&T”s SysV Unix. To migrate to Unix was the plan, not to upgrade DOS.
> There is nothing disreputable about "free software only". Sometimes it is not realistic or practical.
So our task is to make it more practical, bring freedom to our reality.
> I also realize that having a dedicated company supporting a product as complicated as SCM is very important.
GNU Ada is a dedicated company supporting free software, the Cygnus division of Red Hat provides support for gcc, gdb and related tools, and there are several companies providing support for PostgreSQL, various parts and distributions of both GNU/Linux and BSD.
> you haven't tried BitKeeper, have you?
No, I haven't tried any. As I said, it was a question. I just read the descriptions, and was wondering. I don't understand why are you so upset, perhaps you have developed a conditioned reflex against principled people in general or free software advocates in particular. Just as a test, what you'd say if I state that there are no relational databases in the market?
> Claiming "I think it does this" isn't really that compelling
Also you telling Aægis doesn't do what it says it does, and that BK does, isn't any more compelling.
> It would be interesting to know why you feel that your freedom is threatened.
Because people trade off liberty for convenience. Who said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance?
People didn't care for their freedom at other times, and what do we have now? Religious persecution, big government, restrictions to speech, movement and trade, proprietary standards, software hoarding... the list of evils is endless.
I'm not sure about what do you mean do you mean that you have several replicating master copies? And what's the relevance of this feature? As far as I understand, it would be just all right to have a master repository and several replications of it. After all, Alan probably does not spend much time disconnected
I don't understand why I would shut up. Lots of people profit from supporting free software, like the Cygnus guys before selling out to Red Hat and the GNU Ada guys – just two examples out of the top of my mind.
I do not have direct experience with dealing with many source control systems, since I do just a light use of CVS as a source control system, but while the CVS team has been accused of being less than responsive, there are lots of alternatives out there. What data you have to support your implication that BK has a monopoly on responsiveness? And you can't really imply that CVS or Aægis or other people don't know their stuff.
I think Aægis does all of this, but in a more disciplined manner. As I made a question, not disputing BK's capabilities but asking about alternatives, it seems you are the weenie.
BTW, what's disreputable about "free software only"? Don't you care about freedom? If you sell your freedom for some marginal funcionality, it's your choice, but please allow other people to choose freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I followed the link to your home page, and I must say I was impressed.
Nevertheless, I must say you will get only as far as SQL goes, and SQL doesn’t really gives you the full benefits of the relational model. While your ideas are certainly very interesting, they would be potentially even more powerful if they were recast in terms not of SQL tables, but of relations.
> But DB2 is generally *relational*, not OO.
IBM DB2 is SQL. While SQL claims to be relational, it isn’t. There are only two faithful implementations of the relational model, one is obsolete, the other is still a beta.
> A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site.
Please do. You may also be interested in some stuff at DMoz Relational Implementations and Model listings... I created these, they have been taken over with no explanations and I could never get back into DMoz, again with now explanations as to why.
> But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.
‘Dubious and impractical’ in which grounds? In fact, it’s hardly dubious because they are the authors and maintainers of the relational model; and it’s not impractical at all because there were already at least two faithful implementations of the relational model already, one currently in beta and other in production usage for twenty years already, not to mention other implementations, partial or not that aren’t perfect but are still more faithful to the model.
> It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution.
The whole point is that SQL is an involution.
> Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?
Yes, as I pointed above. The issue here is that the market has in the eighties taken the ‘safe’ option (IBM SQL/DS) and fell in love with it over the better alternatives, just as it did with MS Windows over Unix and OS/2 in the nineties.
> Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema.
Again that’s a failure in the tools and processes. Even if SQL is fundamentally flawed, if it was really standard integrating all these databases wouldn't be so hard; if it was really distributed it would be a given; if on top of this all these products were properly documented, this job would be almost done already.
Well mr AC, perhaps that’s some kind of joke that makes sense to people with a better command of the English language than mine but I’ll run the risk of asking you to post this photos somewhere.
> He writes that relational databases do not exist. I looked (in the first article) for some support for this startling idea and found only:
You can hardly want to get the whole truth from a single article in a web site while its authors have written several other articles in that web site, and indeed several books about the issue.
If I were to summarize the articles and books that you didn’t care to read, I’d say that SQL never intended to use more than a few basic relational ideas, without ever caring about being faithful to the whole theoretical model. As an analogy you could say that it would be like trying to implement OO without encapsulation: if a model is completely subverted by a product claiming to support it, the claim can’t be considered valid.
> He seems to ignore the real-world considerations that drive data warehousing.
You seem to be reaching conclusions without enough reading. The whole point of relational is that a single database would be able to perform adequately for different applications. That’s impossible with SQL precisely because by subverting the relational model SQL looses many of the advantages the relational model was created to provide. If current databases were relational they would require neither such a beefy hardware to start with, nor such costly programming and conversion procedures.
Also, you fail to distinguish the different meanings of data model, and indeed the goal of data modelling: to make data understandable, logic and accessible. If there are ‘different data models’ in a company, that means already a failure either in the DBMS, or in the data modelling, or both.
including the Web, Byte and others, I’ve written down in Portuguese. I’ve already got a very bad translation into English, am looking for confirmation about the exact relationship between Mach and NT before I do a proper revision of the English version.
> can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism
Microsoft oriented press usually have little regard for jornalistic quality standards, but as far as I remember this article is correct: Prism was the hardware, Mica the OS for Digital’s ‘future system’ that failed, prompting Cutler to go work at Microsoft. Interesting that these ‘future systems’ have a tendency of going seriously wrong: IBM’s gave us SQL instead of relational, and that is worse than Windows!.
> Melinda is a LISP weenie.
I’d love to see some proof of, some reference for this. Looks like a simple joke
Only that he's not really a MBA. He got at least a honoris causa title from Holland, in a move by a business school-mistakenly-turned-University that is regretted by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra at his convocation speech for the graduates of the College of Natural Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin in December 1.996.
I remain faithful to SCSI because of IDE's (ATA's) problems of reliability, not only because SCSI drives are usually better tested but also because ATA's specification is defective. Is sATA supposed to fix this? Or I will continue to have to shell out the buck to get SCSI reliability and speed?
> I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"
Obviously we’d need MS Windows and MS Office source code to be able to find errors – without that Microsoft will usually just push it to the hardware or other aplications or specific configuration or user errors in the system tested.
> Adolph Hitler was Catholic.
Only by heritage, at most he paid lip service.
> The Vatican owns Great Britain and the United Nations.
Ridiculous assertion, can you back it up? Great Britain is at odds with the Vatican for five hundred years already, and the United Nations actively promote actions contrary to the Vatican like artificial birth control.
> The Catholic religion was started by the Romans.
‘Catholicus’ means ‘universal’ – it’s not a proper name, but simply the expression of the Roman church pretension to be universally dominant. Anyway Romanism is a mixture of Christianity, heresy and Roman political institutions and structures. Nothing is as simple, you should read more than fanatical anti-Romanist tracts.
> The Catholic Church is evil.
Man is evil, Romanism is a human institution, therefore Romanism is evil. Man was created in God’s image, Romanism was created by man, therefore Romanism still has some reflections of God’s image, distorted as it may be. The same holds true to any other religious organization, from Eastern misticism to localist congregational protestant churches, but in varying degrees.
Again, nothing is so simple, neither God nor Man.
> Hitler was a practicing Catholic
First, one can argue if Romanism is an expression of orthodox Christianity. Second, practicing does not mean orthodox and sincere. Third, try to back your affirmation with some reliable source.
> Religion, traditional family, a return to a glorified past, and fear of the outsiders were all big themes in his rhetoric.
Do you trust a politician’s rhetoric as a measure of his beliefs?
Also, which religion? Whatever his rhetoric, Hitler’s party intended to substitute itself for the Christian church in conquered Europe, especially Germany, Central and Eastern Europe.
> The highest award a Nazi soldier could ever receive was in the shape of a cross.
This would be a German soldier, whose army held some relics of past, including Christian-derived symbols. One one hand, not all Germans were Nazis, to the point of professional officials of the Wehrmacht trying to eliminate the Führer; on the other, the Nazi part had its own armies, the SS and and the SA.
> our civilization was born long before Christ appeared on the scene.
This statement is wrong to the point of uselessness. There isn’t really such a thing as the birth of a civilization, much less with a single simple cause; you’d need to define what you mean by ‘our civilization’ first anyway.
What is usually know as Western Civilization has many roots – the Hebrews; the Classical (Greek and Roman) culture represented by many diverging agents, including secular (Aristoteles) and pious (Socrates, Plato) ones; Jesus Christ; paganism itself; the Roman Law and the Constitution of the city of Rome; and many assorted others.
> While Christianity was not the cause of what happened to the Roman Empire, it was certainly a symptom of it - a simpler, more brutish world view that fit simpler, more brutish times.
Calling Christianity brutish is like calling business men ‘Mafiosi’ – while many brutes call themselves Christian it does not make Christianity condone brute behaviour and beliefs, just as Mafiosi calling themselves businessmen does not make all businessmen Mafiosi.
Calling Christianity simple just shows your ignorance of Christian Theology, Philosophy and Cosmogony.
Calling Christianity a symptom of the end of the Classical Culture shows your total ignorance of causes and effects, as well as timelines – Christianity had its origins much before the end of the Empire, and what eventually took over Europe wasn’t Christianity, but feudal lords who paid lip service to the Roman church which was very substandard Christianity anyway.
As for wars, religion is just one more convenient pretext, and fanatical religion more convenient still; but fanaticism is a failure in how one believes and practices religion, not necessarily a failure in Christianity – unless you define Christianity to be whatever is practice by people who fancy themselves Christians, but that is not a very useful definition.
>> The Christian religion, is one of the primary reasons for the development of Europe to where it is today.
> That's a laughable statement. Development of Europe was held back by an oppressive religious government, and only really started when secularism took hold
First, things aren’t simple as that – there are many and complex causes for both the Middle Ages problems and for Renaissance.
Second, your ‘oppressive religious government’ wasn’t quite Christian, but feudalist – on one side one can argue that the Roman Catholic organization falls short of the Christian standards, and on the other the Roman church itself didn’t always condoned in the acts of feudal lords, even if it seldom questioned Feudalism itself.
Third, you forget the role the Reformation had in the Renaissance.
> Hitler was indeed a christian.
What’s your definition of a Christian? Hitler would be of Christian cultural heritage, but he neither believed the doctrines nor walked the way, and both are necessary to qualify as a Chistian. Having the cultural heritage makes no one a disciple of Christ – at most it would make one a heretic; to be a Christian one has to believe and practice the orthodox doctrines.
Agustinus, Tomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Francis A Schæffer, Cornelius van Til
> It was a joke, we got it, you didn't get it fully
He got it, he said it is funny, the statement that it is funny is in the subject line.
> This is a pointless statement. This has no relation whatsoever. Are you recruiting?
The point here is that, contrary to the climate of opinion in may scientifical and technical environments, it is not necessary to be dumb if one’s a Christian.
Christians are always recruiting. In fact, anyone with strong convictions – religious, political, technical – is always recruiting.
> even under Cristianity, somebody has to be God.
But we already know (kinda, possibly truly but never exhaustively, in the human limitations) Who God is, and certainly He's not Knuth.
> Hitler was a practicing Catholic (look it up)
He would never be considered a ‘good Catholic’ by any priest... anyway it's recorded in primary sources that the Nazi party intended to become a religion as soon as they won the war. The plans were to confiscate all churches, to either ‘convert’ or incarcerate or kill all priests and pastors, substitute the swastika for the cross and the Mein Kampf for the Bible. Dates related to the Fuhrer and his ascention to power in Germany would substitute for Christmas and Easter.
Look it up.
> In fact, the introduction of Christianity into Europe coincided with an enourmous cultural and economic decline known to us as the Dark Ages.
Not at all. Constantinus introduced a form of state religion based partially on an already decadent distortion of Christian doctrine heavily influenced by popular religion and conditioned by an eclesiastic formal organization closely modelled on the Roman Empire itself. Formal Christianity may be dominant in Europe and America, but its correlation to the original, biblical Christian doctrine is loose at best.
> MS was originally going to upgrade DOS to be Unix like
No I have a write-up about how the original plan was to migrate users to Xenix, a version of AT&T”s SysV Unix. To migrate to Unix was the plan, not to upgrade DOS.
For those of you who can read Portuguese (or its sibling language Spanish), a short overview of MGM's decadence by Ruy Castro.
> There is nothing disreputable about "free software only". Sometimes it is not realistic or practical.
So our task is to make it more practical, bring freedom to our reality.
> I also realize that having a dedicated company supporting a product as complicated as SCM is very important.
GNU Ada is a dedicated company supporting free software, the Cygnus division of Red Hat provides support for gcc, gdb and related tools, and there are several companies providing support for PostgreSQL, various parts and distributions of both GNU/Linux and BSD.
> you haven't tried BitKeeper, have you?
No, I haven't tried any. As I said, it was a question. I just read the descriptions, and was wondering. I don't understand why are you so upset, perhaps you have developed a conditioned reflex against principled people in general or free software advocates in particular. Just as a test, what you'd say if I state that there are no relational databases in the market?
> Claiming "I think it does this" isn't really that compelling
Also you telling Aægis doesn't do what it says it does, and that BK does, isn't any more compelling.
> It would be interesting to know why you feel that your freedom is threatened.
Because people trade off liberty for convenience. Who said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance?
People didn't care for their freedom at other times, and what do we have now? Religious persecution, big government, restrictions to speech, movement and trade, proprietary standards, software hoarding... the list of evils is endless.
I'm not sure about what do you mean do you mean that you have several replicating master copies? And what's the relevance of this feature? As far as I understand, it would be just all right to have a master repository and several replications of it. After all, Alan probably does not spend much time disconnected
I don't understand why I would shut up. Lots of people profit from supporting free software, like the Cygnus guys before selling out to Red Hat and the GNU Ada guys – just two examples out of the top of my mind.
I do not have direct experience with dealing with many source control systems, since I do just a light use of CVS as a source control system, but while the CVS team has been accused of being less than responsive, there are lots of alternatives out there. What data you have to support your implication that BK has a monopoly on responsiveness? And you can't really imply that CVS or Aægis or other people don't know their stuff.
I think Aægis does all of this, but in a more disciplined manner. As I made a question, not disputing BK's capabilities but asking about alternatives, it seems you are the weenie.
BTW, what's disreputable about "free software only"? Don't you care about freedom? If you sell your freedom for some marginal funcionality, it's your choice, but please allow other people to choose freedom.
Sorry, sir, no open source purists here. We stand for freedom.