Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 00:00:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), kris@catonic.net (Kris Kirby), brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), chip@wiegand.org (Chip Wiegand), chat@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Chat) Subject: Re: Just an observation - MUA's seen in the lists Message-ID: <200104140000.RAA20921@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20010413232829.P82834@lpt.ens.fr> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Apr 13, 2001 11:28:29 PM
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> > o FreeBSD steadfastly refuses to choose a > > single official GUI and toolkit (this is > > one of the reasons Microsoft states they > > have not ported Office to Linux) > > When did Microsoft say that was a reason? In an interview with Dave something or other, VP over Office and similar products, in an article on Slashdot. He said that that was _one_ of the reasons. Another reason he gave is the Linux communities hatred of everything Microsoft. FreeBSD doesn't have that handicap (Knee-jerk Kamikaze Fanatics Against Microsoft). > And do you honestly think they would port it to FreeBSD if "lobbied" > to do so? No. For the other reasons stated. They might, if FreeBSD made their ABI run everywhere, like Linux seems intent on doing, since it would immediately buy the UnixWare, SCO OpenServer, Solaris, and other x86 UNIX systems (maybe even Linux) as potential customers. > > o FreeBSD does not have a standard install > > software system that is as sophisticated as > > InstallShield, for use by commercial > > software installation > > It seems to me that all a company needs to do is supply their own > install and uninstall programs, which are graphical front-ends to > the pkg_add and pkg_delete commands. One click, pkg_add; another > click, pkg_delete. No. To be as kind as possible, pkg_add is a piece of shit. > > o FreeBSD does not have a standard method of > > installing and uninstalling startup and > > shutdown procedures for third party layered > > software that would allow such software to > > replace FreeBSD default components (e.g to > > replace Sendmail with MS Exchange for FreeBSD). > > The thing to do would be to have separate startup scripts in > /usr/local/etc/rc.d or whatever for exchange, and ask the user to say > sendmail_enable="NO" in /etc/rc.conf (any competent sysad should know > to do that, surely?) No. That is not to the level of ease of use which they require of a product which has tehir name on it. Read their guidelines on the Microsoft Developer web site, some time. > Besides, I don't think one should encourage them to port MS Exchange > for FreeBSD. (Or MS Office, either, actually. Unless it switches > to some open XML-based document format, as I read somewhere they're > planning to do.) Yeah, and while you are discouraging them from doing that, people are buying Windows for their desktops because of the average estimated $2,500 per seat that a company spends to train their employees not being portable to FreeBSD because the applications on FreeBSD don't follow the Windows style guidelines, and it's impossible to hire a temp worker who is already trained on the FreeBSD specific applications, but it's easy to hire someone trained on Office to fill in for a day down in your finance department. It's about money, which is what the people who don't pay money for their software can't seem to understand, and why they aren't making any significant inroads into The Real World(tm). Cost is not measured in software costs: that's the least of it, or people would balk at paying Microsoft's rates. As a starving college student, you might like free software and balk at the cost, but as a starving college student, your cost for Microsoft products is "a lot of money", while your time is practically worthless, so 80 hours spent learning TeX costs you less, overall, than buying the product would. But now try to get a temp job doing TeX to make some extra money. > > o FreeBSD management and operation is far from user > > friendly; thus a Microsoft product would be as hard > > to manage as any other package, well below Microsoft's > > usability standards: > > > > o Fixing this requires a "regitry" style system > > /var/db/pkg? All one needs is a GUI tool to use it. Surely Microsoft > would be willing to write that if they thought it was a big issue. No. A centralized configuration data store, so that (as an example) one MS product which knows about the innards of another can get information about it from a central place, through a single API. > > o FreeBSD's developement environment is nowhere near as > > usable for shallow programmers of desktop software as, > > for example, Visual BASIC or Visual C++. > > kdevelop? Is that the Visual C++ equivalent for FreeBSD, widely hailed by FreeBSD application developers as such, so that it now costs next to nothing to hire kids right out of colledge to use it, without having to spend money to train them on it? > > Really, FreeBSD is unsuitable for use as an MUA supporting > > desktop machine, unless your users are much more sophisticated > > than average. > > I disagree. Of course you disagree. You are a geek, not a secretary or a stock broker. > The reason most users use windows is that they get it > pre-installed; they don't find it any easier to fix if they have a > problem. Sure they do: 1) Call help desk 2) Help desk reinstalls machine or brings you a replacement 3) Go back to using the computer as a tool, instead of as an ends in itself (like some geek) > I have installed linux (around 2 years ago, when the GUI's were > much less polished) for people having trouble with their > windows machines, and they're continuing to use that linux > installation to this day. They probably get pissed when they get a PowerPoint presentation, Excell spreadsheet, or Word document as an email atttachment. Or you installed the entire shop that way, and they are a small closed shop that doesn't often communicate with other businesses in The Real World(tm) > Netscape for email and web browsing, > Staroffice for basic word processing, KDE 1.0 desktop, and they're > quite happy. Today, I'd go for FreeBSD with KDE 2.x; I agree that > I couldn't ask them to install it themselves, but if I did it for > them, I'm quite sure they'll be happy with the end results. Until they had to do business with someone other than themselves. If I'm buying an $16M package of sub-prime credit loans at a rediscounted rate form Credit Suisse-First Boston, you can be damn sure that the data they send to me is going to be in the form of an Excell spreadsheet. If you do business with _anyone_ else using your computers, you _can't_ live with a closed shop system. That's jus the way business is. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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