[ale] please won't someone help me with Linux

[Chris Ricker]

On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Joe Bayes wrote:

> Chris Ricker typeth:
> >***Mandrake
> 
> Mandrake also claims to have everything compiled with PGCC. They also
> say they distribute all their source and documentation in .bz2 format;
> I'm surprised RH and the rest haven't moved over to this. Disk may be
> cheap, but it ain't free.

Most others don't use bzip2 because cpu time isn't free.  It's the same
reason most haven't switched to pgcc (well, besides pgcc being non-trusted
;-)--most of the world is not running on PII's with 256 megs.  Look at the
project to put RedHat on 100,000 computers in Mexican elementary schools
that's underway, and look at what they're running it on.  Talk to the
geneticists my lab collaborates with in India, who are grateful for a 386
w/ 8 megs and a bank of car batteries to run it off of.  etc.

> 
> >Debian and RH are special in
> >that they're the only completely open-sourced distributions, which matters
> 
> Almost. RH includes some non-open-source s/w in their distribution
> (netscape, at least...I'm not sure how many others).

As does debian.

[kaboom at dobzhansky kaboom]$ dpkg -l | grep netscape
ii  netscape-base-4 14             Popular World-Wide-Web browser software
(bas
ii  netscape-base-4 4.6-1          4.6 base support for netscape
ii  netscape-java-4 4.6-1          Netscape Java support for version 4.6
[kaboom at dobzhansky kaboom]$ dpkg -l | grep communicator
ii  communicator-ba 4.6-1          Communicator base support for version 4.6
ii  communicator-sm 4.6-1          Netscape Communicator 4.6 (static Motif)
[kaboom at dobzhansky kaboom]$ 

I don't buy Debian's "we put it in the non-free section (not the contrib
section, the non-free section), so it's not *really* part of our OS" claims.  
They count those packages when they hype that they have umpteen zillion
packages in the distribution.  They can't have it both ways.  Furthermore,
Debian's policies about what they'll include and won't include are absurd.  
They include qmail, which has a license that precludes such, but won't
include Pine, claiming that its license forbids them to, even though it
doesn't?  C'mon.  They also include software which RedHat refuses to because
of licensing issues (xv, for example).

> However, they
> open-source all of the software they write in-house. 

Which is what I was actually referring to.  When I want to change the
installer I can.  I can't do that with Caldera, or SuSE, or....  As an
end-user, I'd be especially leary of SuSE, since even their admin stuff is
non-open source (at least Caldera's COAS is; it's just the lizard stuff you
can't modify), if I actually cared about admin software.

> >Similarly, the ethics behind Mandrake and the like bother me slightly.  
> >What they do is certainly legal, but I don't think it's very ethical, and I
> >don't think it's good for the Linux community in the long term--someone's
> >got to spend the millions that RH does on R & D and on paying kernel hackers
> >to code, and which RH won't be able to afford to spend if people like
> >Mandrake continue to sell what is essentially RH's product at a
> >significantly lower price; 
> 
> Remember that Red Hat didn't make Red Hat Linux. Linus (& cast of
> thousands) did most of the work; Red Hat just took everybody else's
> work, put it together and put whipped cream on top, and charged money
> for it.

Have you ever built a linux box from scratch (eg, start with a blank hard
drive and a boot floppy)?  Distribution makers do a *lot* of work to get
their systems together.  Go to debian.org and look at any random package to
see all the changes they had to make to it (because of the way their package
system works, debian's the easiest one to browse like that; you could just
as well look at someone else's srpms).

Just for a random example, consider knfsd (the kernel nfs server stuff).
rpc.mountd that comes with it binds a random high-numbered privileged port.
That's a major pain when you're setting up firewalling, because it binds a
different port every time you boot the system.  RH patches it to bind a
specific port, which makes life a lot easier for me (something Debian
doesn't do, so I always have to do it myself when I install Debian).
Mandrake doesn't have to pay someone to figure out stuff like that.  They
just recompile RH's package and get it for free.  That's true for all the
packages on any distribution--they're almost never stock.  Mandrake doesn't
have to pay someone to figure out that pkg foo needs patch bar to work with
pkg baz.

Also, think about how much time and money it takes to debug the fact that
installer_foo works with motherboard chipset bar but has problem x on
chipset baz.

You're also ignoring all the money RH pours back into Linux development. You
can thank them for davem having the Ultrasparc being the quality work it is
today.  You can thank them for the journalling filesystem Stephen Tweedie is
about to release.  etc. That's something Mandrake doesn't do.  Mandrake's R
& D, last time I saw figures, was 2 orders of magnitude smaller and spent
entirely in-house (on making add-on packages and such).

> Linus worked hard to make sure that I can pay $2 for whatever
> Linux I want, and I plan to honor him by doing so. :)

I think he'd be more honored if you paid more so his fellow hackers could
eat ;-).

> In any case, Red Hat's product (i.e. what people actually pay for) is
> 90% tech support and hand holding, and Mandrake isn't selling Red
> Hat's tech support, they make their own. 

Maybe for you.  What I pay RedHat for is the work they went to making all
the packages play nicely together, minimizing the work I have to do.  I've
never used their tech support, and I've bought a heckuva lot of their
product over the years.

> p.s. That said, has anybody been able to find a ftp site with the
> 1300+ rpms on CDs #3 and 4 of their Power Pack?

I doubt it.  That's what your $40 really gets you.

Enough ranting.  I'm late for the class I'm teaching ;-).

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu