As far as I remember it's not the first time Borland tries to impose outrageous licenses to its compiler customers. We shouldn't care because we have gcc, but still it makes one wonder why big companies can't learn from their miskates. I guess size has something to do with it.
Unfortunately you see them wrong... MySQL sure isn't good enough, but with PostgreSQL behind it Apache and BSD or GNU become unbeatable. Both Apache and PostgreSQL are also present in Debian mirrors and BSD ports collection, so they are just there.
But if you want to compare the proprietary side, even if Oracle and J2EE are expensive, they are much better than IIS and SQL Server. The problem is that most corporate decisions, are ill informed and ill formed.
Can someone give a good URL with more data on this, especifically comparision to NFS, Coda and others? While anything can be better than SMB (CIFS), betting NFS would be very, very hard, let alone Coda, Intermezzo and the like.
Yes you are. Red Hat went with an unfinished project because it was their own. Not invented here syndrome, and wanting control.
In the way that dpkg was made to support sound, forward-looking policies, while rpm just to make things work without giving it much thought. The result is that there is a multiplicity of overlapping tools to help overcome shortcomings of rpm at the same time as it has unnecessary complexity (like versioning), while Debian tools are so well thought-of that even apt was made extensible enough to serve rpm also.
It is a situation analogous to Compaq iPaq and Digital Itsy: the techs learn whatever they need with free software, management kills the transformation of the prototype into a product and instead release a proprietary system. So the enterprise uses free software to learn enough to promote proprietary systems.
That's why we need the GNU GPL and FDL, but still that's not enough.
First, technically theoretical peak transfer rates aren't the most relevant measure, but the capacity for concurrent, continued use of the bus in high loads without degradation. There SCSI and 1394 excel over ATA and USB.
Second, politically the superior SCSI and 1394 are advancing at a lower pace than they should because their market~ and mindshare is being compressed between the lower quality and price ATA and USB standard and the high price, sometimes proprietary standards like SAN, IO2 and the such -- don't remember the names, IBM had its own also.
It's not an end user decision, it's a hacker decision that was overriden by a corporation. And ill-informed system administrators -- "every user a system administrator", even if not educated enough that corroborated that.
As you noted, the user is left feeling the pain, no more than that.
Not a single distribution, but a set of best practice guidelines for packaging that is created for system administrators by hackers.
The issue with huge number of deb packages, it is true -- all of them created integrated with the same set of packaging and system administration policies in mind. Whereas the rpm format is actually fragmented into a very low lowest common denominator, or else duplicated for all the different inconsistent RPM distros.
Could you give us an URL for a good explanation *and* proposal for this.spec issue? I'm not familiar with it.
Macs as machines and architecture are still technically far superior to PCs. Silent, energy-efficient and beautiful. Pity it's a closed architecture, but so is the PC becoming.
Paralleling the Debian/Red Hat situation, PCs' only advantage is soon to became market~ and mindshare.
You lack information, please investigate more before passing opinion.
You are comparing *release* dates, which are totally irrelevant, and so is the initial release state of dpkg and rpp.
The point is that Red Hat forket dpkg -- rather ignored it altogether -- to create rpm because they suffer from the Not Invented Here syndrome; they didn't want to participate in the political and technical Debian open decision making. And in doing so they created a worse packaging system that has worst policy decisions built in.
As for the initial state of dpkg and rpm, the point is that dpkg has the future built in, while rpm was and will always be badly crafted.
No paranoia here, no anti-Debian conspiration -- it's just the usual way things go. There's something better that takes time to get right, someone takes a short cut that has bad consequences but gets to market first, so grabbing both market~ and mindshare.
The comparision to ext2fs actually works against RPM. In the Linux kernel problem space Linus gets to decide on the standard filesystem, he decides slowly and is conservative so to get technical excellence first. But he simply isn't interested in the distribution problem space.
Excuse me, RPM handles dependencies and version more sophisticadedly? Sure... but here comes Occam's razor: dpkg's way is much simples and get all the work done with less fuss and more efficiently. RPM has lots of short-sighted unnecessary complications built-in.
As for your local LUG mailing list, sorry, but local LUGs aren't any standard for technical excellence. Most people there never seen proper system administration, still think MySQL is really a RDBMS, SQL is the relational standard and don't grok functional languages.
The issue is that with apt-rpm you don't get all the good policy decisions that are usually taken for granted in deb packages. The use of deb (or any common successor to both deb and rpm that is a superset of *both*) coupled with FHS may make it far easier to compare "common" packages floating everywhere, like vendors' ones, to high-quality Debian ones.
Sure the RPM situation is far better than the Win32 one. But comparing to.NET,.NET at least was submitted to a standards body, which is not the case with RPM.
RPMs are not shoddy technology, I just used it as an example of an inferior technology taking the place of a superior one -- depending on your technical beliefs you could point other examples like Alphas against anything else, RISC against CISC, QUEL against SQL, RDBMS versus object orientation, functional versus OO, Lisp systems versus POSIX, POSIX versus Win32, or whatever.
BTW, if people switched to Debian -- even by using apt with RPM as a bridge to apt with dpkg -- users and sysadmins would be able to more easily compare the quality of the packages they get with Debian ones, to more easily adopt anv verify compliance to better system-wide distribution policies like Debian's before accepting packages from anyone... it would be far easier to package (just recompile and rebuild the packages) to every platform already supported by Debian.
Like POSIX versus Microsoft, it's not about a product like GNU/Linx versus another product like Windows; it's about cultural differences and their practical consequences.
Historically the US companies get the last say on standards and product acceptance. IBM UK had the far superior BS12 relational system, but IBM US got the substandard SQL accepted instead; Symbian from Europe has had the Psion in widespread use much before Palm's success in the US, but Psion has been cancelled in the end-user market (only cell phones now) and even them Microsoft is pushing WinCE and will probably succeed in the long run if GNU/Linux don't get there first.
Even if components are manufactured in the Far East, it is big integrators like Acer, Toshiba and the like, specially the US ones IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, that get to set standards set by US monopolists Microsoft and Intel. And US law is also the standard for international law and treaties, as well as the template for other countries -- witness DMCA, copyright extensions and the like.
As for the Be case, I mentioned it because it shows how much power US companies have to shut down competitors' access to entire market segments. It is an example from the much more closed Apple market space, but the PC market is becoming more and more like that.
All these PCs, even if small, are still noisy... if you try to build a silent one, it is big; and the small ones need fans.
If we could buy an efficient processor that didn't generate much heat -- that would mean RISC: ARM, PowerPC, the notebook Alpha 21264 that was never built, MIPS -- and build our own silent, energy-efficient, small systems, I wouldn't have my craving for a Cube or new iMac. If it had USB 2, 1394b and SCSI 3 so much the better -- throw in a slot-loading SuperDrive to burn DVDs *and* CDs and it's a deal.
> problem rises when the money you get is not only getting used to generate more money (of course not), but to prevent other people/companies to earn a share
I wonder why so many people want to measure everything using monetary values.
The issue is not that money is used to prevent other people from earning money. The whole problem is that unethically earned money is used to take freedom away from us. Sure this is not only Microsoft's fault, it is a problem present even in primitive tribes in Brazilian rain forest. But today Microsoft, besides the drug dealers and mass media, is probably the worst offender.
SSCA, or any other attempt at a closed platform to be sure we don't make copies unauthorized by content holders and proprietary software vendors. That could force BIOS and motherboard vendors' hands. It is not far-fetched, just look at what game console vendors already try to do to control the console and game markets, and DVD vendors already do. No matter how bad their security is, and how many technical hacks we can devise to make things work, if we don't win the war to educate the public then the law will always be against us.
If you find it improbable that a now open market will be closed, just remember the death of Macintosh's clones and BeOS.
RPM was created as duplication of effort, because Debian wasn't willing to rush a half-baked dpkg. Now it becomes a standard. Reeks to me of Microsoft Windows-like storyline.
Why not just port and use dkpg, apt and associated tools? They were all created to be portable, and are indeed already used in http://fink.sf.net./, http://debian-cygwin.sf.net./ and the like.
This thing shouldn't have the SQL, relational or DBMS words in it. It is a simple data access engine, supporting neither even the most basic SQL features properly (like datatypes), nor the most basic DBMS requirements (like ACID transactions).
The original pronounciation for SQL in IBM was Sequel, but it was changed to S-Q-L because of trademark issues.
It's ironical that people feel like they have to say S-Q-L instead of Sequel to be in the know, since if you know the history of the product *and* don't want to appease lawyers you can much more comfortably say Sequel.
What amazes me is that everyone seems to go getting cheapo. USB here is clearly a kludge, and even USB 2.0 wouldn't be much better. It was created as a serial bus for low performance peripherals like keyboard, mice, handheld scanners and the like, substituting both RS-232C and 1284 (Centronics and descendants).
If it was a real quality product it would have one USB 2.0 port, one Ethernet 100 Mbps, and one 1394 (Firewire). At least one USB 1 and one 1394, because USB is cheap and 1394 is the standard for digital video, being the only adequate technology for high-performance devices besides SCSI, and much cheaper than SCSI.
Essentially, there's no one one will get decent performance of even USB 2.0 network or mass storage adapters, but 1394 should be good enough, not to mention SCSI.
Shouldn't this be a job for 1394, along with mass storage, image scanning and the like?
It seems to me that USB is being overstretched, together with ATA and after RS-232C and IEEE 1284... all of the stuff done by ATA, RS-232C and 1284 should be done by SCSI and 1394, and so much of the stuff currently being done with USB.
I never heard or read that Sun was GNU minded. Indeed they have been sitting for something like seven years on a internal document by a bigshot (Bill Joy in 1.994? could someone find the URL for the PostScript document?) recommending to GPL Solaris.
If that was done we wouldn't have needed so much effort duplication on Linux and the various BSDs -- OK, perhaps BSDs would have continued on the basis of the license and leanness of it, Linux on the basis of flexibility (not having a corporation in charge), and the GNU Project on politics. But each of this, and other free software projects, would have been able to reuse Solaris source code, and that would be a gread advantage for open systems in general and free software in particular, getting us better free systems earlier and advancing the open systems cause.
Not only that, it would have been much harder for Microsoft and proprietary, low-quality software to become so dominant.
It's already to late for the GPL'ing of Solaris to have the original intended effects, but it would still be A Good Thing (TM).
As usual, Microsoft and the enemies of liberty in general win their victories not because they're good in any sense, but due to the failures of their foes.
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As far as I remember it's not the first time Borland tries to impose outrageous licenses to its compiler customers. We shouldn't care because we have gcc, but still it makes one wonder why big companies can't learn from their miskates. I guess size has something to do with it.
Unfortunately you see them wrong... MySQL sure isn't good enough, but with PostgreSQL behind it Apache and BSD or GNU become unbeatable. Both Apache and PostgreSQL are also present in Debian mirrors and BSD ports collection, so they are just there.
But if you want to compare the proprietary side, even if Oracle and J2EE are expensive, they are much better than IIS and SQL Server. The problem is that most corporate decisions, are ill informed and ill formed.
Can someone give a good URL with more data on this, especifically comparision to NFS, Coda and others? While anything can be better than SMB (CIFS), betting NFS would be very, very hard, let alone Coda, Intermezzo and the like.
Yes you are. Red Hat went with an unfinished project because it was their own. Not invented here syndrome, and wanting control.
In the way that dpkg was made to support sound, forward-looking policies, while rpm just to make things work without giving it much thought. The result is that there is a multiplicity of overlapping tools to help overcome shortcomings of rpm at the same time as it has unnecessary complexity (like versioning), while Debian tools are so well thought-of that even apt was made extensible enough to serve rpm also.
It is a situation analogous to Compaq iPaq and Digital Itsy: the techs learn whatever they need with free software, management kills the transformation of the prototype into a product and instead release a proprietary system. So the enterprise uses free software to learn enough to promote proprietary systems.
That's why we need the GNU GPL and FDL, but still that's not enough.
No, this was only meant to substitute for RS-232C and RS-422A, never SCSI. The SCSI problem space was left for 1394.
Cheaper, lower-quality and frustrating. That's life, but we can strive for better.
This numbers are misleading.
First, technically theoretical peak transfer rates aren't the most relevant measure, but the capacity for concurrent, continued use of the bus in high loads without degradation. There SCSI and 1394 excel over ATA and USB.
Second, politically the superior SCSI and 1394 are advancing at a lower pace than they should because their market~ and mindshare is being compressed between the lower quality and price ATA and USB standard and the high price, sometimes proprietary standards like SAN, IO2 and the such -- don't remember the names, IBM had its own also.
It's not an end user decision, it's a hacker decision that was overriden by a corporation. And ill-informed system administrators -- "every user a system administrator", even if not educated enough that corroborated that.
As you noted, the user is left feeling the pain, no more than that.
Not a single distribution, but a set of best practice guidelines for packaging that is created for system administrators by hackers.
.spec issue? I'm not familiar with it.
The issue with huge number of deb packages, it is true -- all of them created integrated with the same set of packaging and system administration policies in mind. Whereas the rpm format is actually fragmented into a very low lowest common denominator, or else duplicated for all the different inconsistent RPM distros.
Could you give us an URL for a good explanation *and* proposal for this
Macs as machines and architecture are still technically far superior to PCs. Silent, energy-efficient and beautiful. Pity it's a closed architecture, but so is the PC becoming.
Paralleling the Debian/Red Hat situation, PCs' only advantage is soon to became market~ and mindshare.
You lack information, please investigate more before passing opinion.
You are comparing *release* dates, which are totally irrelevant, and so is the initial release state of dpkg and rpp.
The point is that Red Hat forket dpkg -- rather ignored it altogether -- to create rpm because they suffer from the Not Invented Here syndrome; they didn't want to participate in the political and technical Debian open decision making. And in doing so they created a worse packaging system that has worst policy decisions built in.
As for the initial state of dpkg and rpm, the point is that dpkg has the future built in, while rpm was and will always be badly crafted.
No paranoia here, no anti-Debian conspiration -- it's just the usual way things go. There's something better that takes time to get right, someone takes a short cut that has bad consequences but gets to market first, so grabbing both market~ and mindshare.
The comparision to ext2fs actually works against RPM. In the Linux kernel problem space Linus gets to decide on the standard filesystem, he decides slowly and is conservative so to get technical excellence first. But he simply isn't interested in the distribution problem space.
Excuse me, RPM handles dependencies and version more sophisticadedly? Sure... but here comes Occam's razor: dpkg's way is much simples and get all the work done with less fuss and more efficiently. RPM has lots of short-sighted unnecessary complications built-in.
As for your local LUG mailing list, sorry, but local LUGs aren't any standard for technical excellence. Most people there never seen proper system administration, still think MySQL is really a RDBMS, SQL is the relational standard and don't grok functional languages.
The issue is that with apt-rpm you don't get all the good policy decisions that are usually taken for granted in deb packages. The use of deb (or any common successor to both deb and rpm that is a superset of *both*) coupled with FHS may make it far easier to compare "common" packages floating everywhere, like vendors' ones, to high-quality Debian ones.
Sure the RPM situation is far better than the Win32 one. But comparing to .NET, .NET at least was submitted to a standards body, which is not the case with RPM.
RPMs are not shoddy technology, I just used it as an example of an inferior technology taking the place of a superior one -- depending on your technical beliefs you could point other examples like Alphas against anything else, RISC against CISC, QUEL against SQL, RDBMS versus object orientation, functional versus OO, Lisp systems versus POSIX, POSIX versus Win32, or whatever.
BTW, if people switched to Debian -- even by using apt with RPM as a bridge to apt with dpkg -- users and sysadmins would be able to more easily compare the quality of the packages they get with Debian ones, to more easily adopt anv verify compliance to better system-wide distribution policies like Debian's before accepting packages from anyone... it would be far easier to package (just recompile and rebuild the packages) to every platform already supported by Debian.
Like POSIX versus Microsoft, it's not about a product like GNU/Linx versus another product like Windows; it's about cultural differences and their practical consequences.
Historically the US companies get the last say on standards and product acceptance. IBM UK had the far superior BS12 relational system, but IBM US got the substandard SQL accepted instead; Symbian from Europe has had the Psion in widespread use much before Palm's success in the US, but Psion has been cancelled in the end-user market (only cell phones now) and even them Microsoft is pushing WinCE and will probably succeed in the long run if GNU/Linux don't get there first.
Even if components are manufactured in the Far East, it is big integrators like Acer, Toshiba and the like, specially the US ones IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, that get to set standards set by US monopolists Microsoft and Intel. And US law is also the standard for international law and treaties, as well as the template for other countries -- witness DMCA, copyright extensions and the like.
As for the Be case, I mentioned it because it shows how much power US companies have to shut down competitors' access to entire market segments. It is an example from the much more closed Apple market space, but the PC market is becoming more and more like that.
All these PCs, even if small, are still noisy... if you try to build a silent one, it is big; and the small ones need fans.
If we could buy an efficient processor that didn't generate much heat -- that would mean RISC: ARM, PowerPC, the notebook Alpha 21264 that was never built, MIPS -- and build our own silent, energy-efficient, small systems, I wouldn't have my craving for a Cube or new iMac. If it had USB 2, 1394b and SCSI 3 so much the better -- throw in a slot-loading SuperDrive to burn DVDs *and* CDs and it's a deal.
> problem rises when the money you get is not only getting used to generate more money (of course not), but to prevent other people/companies to earn a share
I wonder why so many people want to measure everything using monetary values.
The issue is not that money is used to prevent other people from earning money. The whole problem is that unethically earned money is used to take freedom away from us. Sure this is not only Microsoft's fault, it is a problem present even in primitive tribes in Brazilian rain forest. But today Microsoft, besides the drug dealers and mass media, is probably the worst offender.
SSCA, or any other attempt at a closed platform to be sure we don't make copies unauthorized by content holders and proprietary software vendors. That could force BIOS and motherboard vendors' hands. It is not far-fetched, just look at what game console vendors already try to do to control the console and game markets, and DVD vendors already do. No matter how bad their security is, and how many technical hacks we can devise to make things work, if we don't win the war to educate the public then the law will always be against us.
If you find it improbable that a now open market will be closed, just remember the death of Macintosh's clones and BeOS.
RPM was created as duplication of effort, because Debian wasn't willing to rush a half-baked dpkg. Now it becomes a standard. Reeks to me of Microsoft Windows-like storyline.
Why not just port and use dkpg, apt and associated tools? They were all created to be portable, and are indeed already used in http://fink.sf.net./, http://debian-cygwin.sf.net./ and the like.
This thing shouldn't have the SQL, relational or DBMS words in it. It is a simple data access engine, supporting neither even the most basic SQL features properly (like datatypes), nor the most basic DBMS requirements (like ACID transactions).
The original pronounciation for SQL in IBM was Sequel, but it was changed to S-Q-L because of trademark issues.
It's ironical that people feel like they have to say S-Q-L instead of Sequel to be in the know, since if you know the history of the product *and* don't want to appease lawyers you can much more comfortably say Sequel.
What amazes me is that everyone seems to go getting cheapo. USB here is clearly a kludge, and even USB 2.0 wouldn't be much better. It was created as a serial bus for low performance peripherals like keyboard, mice, handheld scanners and the like, substituting both RS-232C and 1284 (Centronics and descendants).
If it was a real quality product it would have one USB 2.0 port, one Ethernet 100 Mbps, and one 1394 (Firewire). At least one USB 1 and one 1394, because USB is cheap and 1394 is the standard for digital video, being the only adequate technology for high-performance devices besides SCSI, and much cheaper than SCSI.
Essentially, there's no one one will get decent performance of even USB 2.0 network or mass storage adapters, but 1394 should be good enough, not to mention SCSI.
Shouldn't this be a job for 1394, along with mass storage, image scanning and the like?
It seems to me that USB is being overstretched, together with ATA and after RS-232C and IEEE 1284... all of the stuff done by ATA, RS-232C and 1284 should be done by SCSI and 1394, and so much of the stuff currently being done with USB.
I never heard or read that Sun was GNU minded. Indeed they have been sitting for something like seven years on a internal document by a bigshot (Bill Joy in 1.994? could someone find the URL for the PostScript document?) recommending to GPL Solaris.
If that was done we wouldn't have needed so much effort duplication on Linux and the various BSDs -- OK, perhaps BSDs would have continued on the basis of the license and leanness of it, Linux on the basis of flexibility (not having a corporation in charge), and the GNU Project on politics. But each of this, and other free software projects, would have been able to reuse Solaris source code, and that would be a gread advantage for open systems in general and free software in particular, getting us better free systems earlier and advancing the open systems cause.
Not only that, it would have been much harder for Microsoft and proprietary, low-quality software to become so dominant.
It's already to late for the GPL'ing of Solaris to have the original intended effects, but it would still be A Good Thing (TM).
As usual, Microsoft and the enemies of liberty in general win their victories not because they're good in any sense, but due to the failures of their foes.