Re: [ossig] IDC: Windows cheaper than Linux

["Colin Charles " <byte@aeon.com.my>]

On 15 Jan 2003 at 10:27, Uwe Dippel wrote:

> this cannot go! This forces a reply. Here it comes.

ditto. it does force a reply.

> One of the troubles M$ had and conceded to have with NT was, that
> certain functions could be accessed only through the GUI. So they tried
> to implement the others and offered those through the Resource Kits,
> because even they (M$) accept, that a useful sysadministration is only
> possible through scripts. Think of the NetLogon that they have for their
> domains, and quite a few more. Just recently Slashdot had a contribution
> of M$ re-inventing the command line, including inventing tab-completion,
> history, grep, yada yada yada... . Why? Surely not for Jack Homeowner.

Tab completion is something fairly new. History has been around since 
the days of Doskey. grep? I've yet to try XP, so I can't say that it 
exists. (my grep only comes when i start up cygwin)

> Eh, by the way: even for the first release of W2K implementation of
> *all* system functions on the command line was a *must* for the
> developers. You seem to be mistaken here ... !

I am not a W2k developer, so I don't know. The argument here is not 
that win2k/xp folk don't ever visit the commandline, but that the 
Freenixes need better GUI tools to match what the Windows world has.

Lets take for example, making a dns zone record. do you:
a) hack it in my hand
b) have a gui that can ease this?

i've heard (but not seen) from windows people that its done fairly 
simply in the windows world. in the unix world, you either hack it by 
hand (my preferred choice) or you go download an additional utility 
(i've been searching for these at the moment, haven't tried them out 
but freshmeat is pretty well stocked).
 
> Of course, the community can and will have to improve on the (remote)
> administration, and a Windoze domain is set up easier than a Unix
> domain. But let us not mislead anyone: where we have to improve is the
> underlying concepts and scripts! To write a GUI for a script is much
> easier than writing the centralised, remote administration.

The community can. And will have to. But with folk still refusing to 
think that a GUI interface is nicer (because of security, because 
they prefer the CLI,because they're afraid that Joe average will take 
over their jobs, tec...) its a bit hard to develop nice things.

So my argument is that we need to change the mindset. Some in the OSS 
world have realised this - gnome's author miguel, eric raymond and 
others have mentioned the need for better tools to entice the others, 
with the mention of dropping to cli just when needed.

Case in point: i configure fetchmail by hand. I used to use fetchmail 
way before esr wrote fetchmailconf. But why did he do it? So he could 
penetrate the mass markets. Simple really. He knows change is 
inevitable.

thanks for listening. apologies for the late reply... i spent lots of 
time listening to folk on OSS stuff. learnt that samba-swat is not 
bad as a gui tool to configure samba, but i wont leave it running (on 
901) unless i really need it.

--
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/


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