Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 13:42:47 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Kris Kirby <kris@catonic.net>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Chip Wiegand <chip@wiegand.org>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Just an observation - MUA's seen in the lists Message-ID: <20010414134247.E40759@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <200104140000.RAA20921@usr02.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 12:00:17AM %2B0000 References: <20010413232829.P82834@lpt.ens.fr> <200104140000.RAA20921@usr02.primenet.com>
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Apart from comments other people have made, > > > 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. And what would you call the Windows registry? The only thing people can do if the registry is damaged is reinstall everything. That's always an option on any operating system, but (except in some bizarre situation) you never have to resort to that on FreeBSD. > > > 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. I can sympathise with ease-of-use requirements on the desktop, but not on a mailserver. If a system administrator couldn't handle any software that wasn't point-and-click, and if I were totally dependent on such a system administrator, I'd make a noise about it. > > 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). I think you're *totally* missing the point here. I don't care whether MS Office costs $10 or $1000 or $10000 per seat. I do care that it has a monopoly, and it has a closed format, which causes a lock-in of users, exactly as you are saying. My way of fighting that is to refuse to read .doc files which other people send me (luckily, in my line that rarely happens); I ask for postscript or PDF instead. Yes, if everyone in the world used MS Word, maybe I'd have to use it too. But the world is not yet quite at that stage and I don't want it to get there. Even if the alternatives cause some temporary pain, I will encourage people to use them, because alternatives are important. Of course, I don't support a proprietary StarOffice or WordPerfect format either. I support an open format, but the only one that currently has any user base at all is TeX/LaTeX. If MS Office XP switches to an open XML document format, it will at least allow the possibility for other software to use the same format, and in that case I will wholeheartedly support porting MS Office to FreeBSD (or linux or whatever). I don't support it now because if the current proprietary format becomes widely available on unix, I believe it will kill whatever little choice still exists. I also think you are overestimating "retraining costs". StarOffice or other suites are not that different from MS Office. People with normal intelligence should be able to learn them (and, in fact, they can). If they can't, I'd have doubts about employing them in the first place. > 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. Eventually, you waste much more time doing a large document in a word processor compared to TeX. You may spend 80 hours learning TeX (and scripting), but the knowledge is useful: if you want to do any sort of repetitive work, you can automate it. Most MS Word users, when faced with making a similar sort of change to 20 different documents, will manually do it for each one of them, which can take a couple of hours where a good TeX user could have done it in a minute. > > > 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. Yes. So I want to encourage alternatives, not find arguments for perpetuating a monopoly. Your argument is that unless FreeBSD includes a certain feature list, it will not be good enough. My argument is that it is already good enough but lacks enough trained support people for the corporate world. You are backing up your argument, not with examples of how MS Office or Visual C++ is actually superior to some FreeBSD equivalent, but with pointing out how entrenched the MS monopoly is. I'm arguing for trying to overthrow that monopoly. If you admit that the problem is the monopoly, then even if all the FreeBSD features in your wishlist suddenly materialised, you have to admit that we're still no closer to being able to use it in the real world. I don't think the features are the problem at all. We're there already. > > 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) Actually it was a home, not a business. And they do use Windows when they have to, but you were originally talking about email MUA's. Rahul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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