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Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk wrote:
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Don't care what you say. I have work to do. I don't want my distribution to require me to spend days Googling to work out how to install my software. I want to tick the boxes in the installer/package manager, have it resolve any dependencies, and then find it in my menu.
OK - so what *do* you use then that has such a package mangler that has the diversity of software available in debian? And who needs to google, 3 seconds on #debian-uk or #alug on OFTC will get you an answer very quickly. 99% of the battle is knowing where to look... If your distribution didn't have xyz package, what steps would you take to make sure that the package list used by the distribution wasn't nuked by you doing a make install and it randomly overwriting some critical libraries (been there, done that, got the damned t-shirt).
As for licensing, to be honest I don't care about that as long as the license gives me the right to use it.
Being a sys admin, you've just made me cringe. So, how do you know that you have the right to use the software, precisely, without reading the licence?
I use Linux because I prefer it to Windows, not because I have a particular bee in my bonnet about software licensing (that would be hypocritical since I happen to write closed source software myself - though I also write open source [Apache licensed as it happens] software as well).
You write closed source software... good for you, I hope that you've checked the licences for the libraries that you're using and that you're not violating them... oh, no, wait... you don't care about licencing... please provide me with a list of software that you develop so that I know what to steer clear of, it's bound to be stupidly licenced, and probably breaking licences of other software.
I use linux because I find that it provides me a nice working environment with much greater stability, it doesn't, however, mean that I don't pay attention to the licences under which the software I have installed is under.
The current most annoying piece of non-free software that I have installed is the nvidia-glx driver, actually... looking at vrms, it's the only one that I actually need on this laptop. I can easily remove the other non-free software, I don't use it, it was installed as I wanted to test some things.
*SIGH* - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk