[Mailman-Users] {Oink!!} Pig at the wedding question/diatribe

[Stewart Dean]

John, everything you say is valid, and your response is helpful.  It is not my intent to 
just 'bitch from the cheap seat'...the old, 'The food's no good and there's not enough of it'.
What I was attempting to express was/is my frustration at a beautiful application with 
many good feature, responsive development, etc., etc....that is missing the boat with the 
fundamental issue of maintenance and updating.  It is like the guy who builds an exquisite 
power boat in the basement...but with no way to get it out of the basement.
I'd think it wouldn't have taken any longer to design the GNU packaging tools and process 
to build single-binary, host-portable output.  A lot of thought has gone into Mailman...a 
little more into in packaging would have boosted its acceptance enormously

John Dennis wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 12:36, Stewart Dean wrote:
> 
>>[ snip free software is hard to use rant ]
> 
> 
> It seems to me you have several options are your disposal:
> 
> 1) Pay a nominal fee for your software. In the Linux domain Red Hat and
> other distribution vendors work hard to provide the type of end user
> experience you want. Enterprise versions seek to provide stability,
> security, and ease of use for demanding enterprise class situations by
> doing active engineering on open source software. Red Hat, SuSE, and
> others are in business, its not a charity (but you can download free
> versions of our RPM from the Fedora project, which forms the base for
> the next enterprise distribution).
> 
> 2) Contribute your time to the project. Most everything you get for free
> with an open source project was done by volunteers who thought it was
> more productive to contribute than complain. Your work in making the
> project better will be appreciated by all.
> 
> 3) Don't use something you never paid for or contributed to.
> 
> John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

-- 
====
Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504
sdean at bard.edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035