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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:50 UTC (Sat) by ejr (subscriber, #51652)Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
A curated application repository where things "just work"? Yup, that's Debian. Oh. Wait. Maybe that's just me. For the past 15+ years.
The "app stores" have some curation mechanism where apps are tested to ensure they work with the system as a whole, right? So does Debian. Debian's isn't fully automated, I admit, but Debian has managed to face various issues head-on like multiple BLAS and LAPACK libraries (quite important to me), a variety of network configurations, etc.
I'm touting Debian just because I use it. Fedora may well be similar. I know RHEL is *NOT*. It's a royal PITA to figure out how to install many things that just work under Debian. (Ubuntu is dead to me for situations that occurred long ago.)
Debian's problem perhaps is leaving too many choices to the end user. But an "enterprise" Debian could pre-choose (well, pre-seed, etc. for FAI) by providing a single deb. When I had more machines than I needed at home, that's how I ran it. Want to pin a version? The package dependency mechanisms handle that quite well. If that prevents some new package or version from installing, you have a clear error message to send to your support folks.
I just don't get what's so hard about all this. Other than there isn't a single company to blame for all the decisions with which you disagree but that you'll slavishly follow.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 10:47 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> A curated application repository where things "just work"? Yup, that's Debian. Oh. Wait. Maybe that's just me. For the past 15+ years.
No they don't 'just work'. A very significant amount of manual labor goes into making it work.
And the same work is duplicated by Red hat, by Gentoo, by everybody else shipping a Linux system. It's a massive effort and very significant amount of work that goes on just doing the same thing that already has been done a dozen times for the sake of maintaining minor technical differences.
And if you want to use a application that is not have a few volunteers whose built it and packaged it for your specific configuration then you SOL. You are stuck copying binaries down using a tarball or some other out of band method, or far worse, have to compile something.
A easy example.
How many of these games can you install using 'apt-get'.
Install just 20 of those.. the equivalent in Windows games would be very much easier in Windows (even with only rudimentary package handling tools) and trivial using Android, and you would have a much more massive selection. It bet it will take you a better part of a day to do it.
A significant number of those games won't work. Many of them will require you build things or copy files around manually. Almost none of them will be updated automatically when fixes and newer versions come out.
Nothing here 'just works'.
If all you ever use is Debian packaged software on Debian systems then that's fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking that is good enough for most people. Because it's obviously not. Because if it was good enough for most people then most people would be using it.
At my work we have to package and build most of the software we use. The majority of it is open source or based on open source products. Almost none of it is available using Debian's repositories. In this way there is very little advantage that apt-get would offer us over equivalent tools in Redhat.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:04 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I've probably said it publicly before, so I'll say it again: what Debian and other distributions need are good, automated ways of packaging upstream code (which may mean more standardisation upstream), and a way for non-privileged users to build on the foundations provided by existing packages, potentially obtained from newer distribution versions, so that they may build, install and run the latest (not yet officially packaged) software if they need to, rather than having to configure, build and install every last dependency by hand.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:04 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
As a Debian maintainer since 2005, I have come to think that automated packaging just isn't possible. In the ideal world, maybe but we don't live in an ideal world. For a start there is a lot of this going on in the area of build systems:
With debhelper 7 we are pretty close, but there are build systems it doesn't support yet and many packages still need override_* targets, even some packages that use plain autotools.
Then there is all the packaging stuff that needs a human; good package descriptions, copyright/licensing stuff, communication with upstream etc.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:45 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Having been through the Debian packaging process recently, I certainly appreciate that there's a gulf between what upstream software provides, even with a helpful author and a well-engineered project, and the finished packaged "product" that has all the documentation and policy-compliance that end-users expect.
But while I understand that there's never going to be a magic button to press that takes just about any source code and produces a package, there could be ways of helping people achieve the technical and procedural standards required by downstream developers and ease the passage of their own code into distributions.
In certain circles, people would be pushed towards using some development environment or other that constrains the developer and generates any necessary boilerplate, although this doesn't ensure that the result is high quality. What would be more compatible with most Free Software development is just the acknowledgement that although distributions have differing practices and can be more or less rigorous than each other on certain issues, the general objectives are mostly the same.
From that point, I think that tools could help people make their software easier to package, such as those developed for Python, despite various baked-in features that have to be overridden because the tools want to do everything including things that they really should have no control over.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 21:57 UTC (Sat) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]
Of course there would be a way out: Package them for Debian. That way others can profit, too.
As for games you'll sadly soon find out that they couldn't care less about free software principles.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 20:01 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"No they don't 'just work'. A very significant amount of manual labor goes into making it work."
And y'know what it's pretty sweet being the beneficiary of all that manual labour.
"Because if it was good enough for most people then most people would be using it."
Wow that's incredibly naive. The major reason people aren't using it is because it doesn't fit in with the economics of today's world and "drive-by software sales", which there is a lot of money in.
I'm confident that a good 90% of software sales today are "drive-by" either through nagware or scareware that ends up on a user's machine either pre-installed by the vendor or by other means.
Even Microsoft do this these days with office sales on new PCs.
I such an environment I think it's pretty meaningless talking about what's "good enough" for a typical user, as they're really just exploited pawns in the market.
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