what are the most popular building and packaging tools for python ??

[kosh]

On Tuesday 26 October 2004 3:07 am, Alex Martelli wrote:

>
> This is certainly a very valid business consideration.  Without (at
> least) source in escrow, or the like, betting your business on ANY
> closed-source app may be very unwise.
>
> Nevertheless, people and businesses use (e.g.) google daily, and depend
> on it -- they don't have google's sources, and if they did they'd be
> little use since the real value in this case is in the huge database
> they're acessing.  Why should any other webservice be different?
>

One of the thing that makes those kinds of webservices different is that you 
can easily leave. Yes google is currently the best but there are lots of 
other search engines that are good enough and would get better pretty rapidly 
if google went nuts, vanished etc. That is part of the degree of protection 
since the person is not really locked in google has to behave or lose them.


> > staggering. Even if the software did not cost any money the price is far
> > too high for what you lose. However the software tends to be very
> > expensive which makes it an even worse investment. The worst ones are
> > those you can't really get the data back out of.
>
> And _that_ is a customer protection law I'd love to see: requiring all
> applications using proprietary formats for user data to provide an
> export functionality (possibly as an auxiliary program) that is able to
> write out the data as XML according to a DTD (or Schema, or RelaxNG,
> whatever) to be published and filed in some accessible archive, and
> import such an XML file back into the app's own format.
>
> Some tolerance for closed source is one thing, hijacking users' data is
> the bit that REALLY makes me see red!-)
>

There is no doubt this should exist I have just seen a number of cases where 
it does not and companies get screwed pretty badly.

>
> And Bengt's idea (apart from requiring a highly specialized CPU in lieu
> of pretty generic network access) doesn't appear to be any more
> objectionable than web services, either.
>
>

The webservice one is much less of a burden on the system. You can upgrade 
your computer, use it from a different computer, use it through a proxy etc. 
The application running on your machine tied to some id on your cpu you can't 
do that with. Many web services even work with a wide range of browsers so 
you are not tied into any given os, browser, hardware platform etc.

Yes your data can still be locked in a proprietary format kept only on the 
server so you never see it except to see reports on that data and I suspect 
that does happen but many services make it very easy to get all of your data 
out of the system. 

So while the webservices can do some of the negative things the crypto cpu 
would it also automatically makes many things far better. If my computer 
takes a lightning strike I can use another computer to use the webservice 
right away. With the crypto app you are pretty much screwed until you go 
through the whole authorization song and dance.