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Re: considered harmful (was [off topic] Learning Shell from an old UNIX book)



On Saturday 15 March 2003 03:05, John Hasler wrote:
> > I know the shortcomings of csh have been discussed elsewhere in this
> > thread. But tcsh is enhanced csh.
>
> I have no problem with csh (or tcsh) as a login shell.  It is just not
> suitable for scripting.
>
> > Perhaps you should rephrase your complaint to address a more significant
> > issue, the presence of non-free software in the build system of a
> > supposedly free software project: I have no faith in the quality of the
> > work of developers who would choose to use Java in their build system.
>
> I wasn't aware of that.  So much for OO.o.
>
> And the fact that Sun would put _both_ csh _and_ Java in a build system
> tells me a lot about Sun.  None of it good.

Well, I was the original poster of the tread, which asked wether I should read 
that specific book in order to learn shell programming or not. first, thanks 
form everyone, with their detailed advises, I am now reading the book, 
following the Bourne examples, an am quite happy with this.

But now that the discussion is about OOo, let me express my opinions about it 
as a user.

OK you guys say that, OOo is bad software because they use csh, and they use 
java to build it. Don't get me wrong, I am a true believer in free software, 
but I guess sometimes, you have to see things from a different point of view.

If OOo wasn't here, I couldn't have been using GNU/Linux. As simple as that. I 
am a university student, and in my university, everybody depends on MS 
Office. All the lecturer's presentations are given in power point, and all 
lecturer's put theire lecture notes on theire website. and guess what, all 
these documents are in MS Word or MS PowrPoint format. Using OOo, I haven't 
had a single problem with all these. I am able to view all these files 
perfectly, and I save my homeworks in MS Office format, and email them to my 
lecturer. If I didn't have OOo, I was forced to install windows on one of my 
partitions, and that's something that I really hate.

I will always be thankfull to Sun, for releasing OOo. I even use OOo Draw, to 
draw algorithms and flowcharts, something that my classmates have to use MS 
Visio for. 

And in my opinion, using non free software in developing a software, shouldn't 
disqualify it from being free software (although RMS won't agree with me ). 
As far as I can see, OOo is licensed under LGPL, and that's good enough for 
me.

Besides, Linus is also using non free software to develop the kernel. Does 
that also mean, that we should all abandon the Linux kernel, and regard it as 
non free software?

Cheers 
-- 
/* Those who do not understand Unix 
are condemned to reinvent it, poorly 
                              -- UNDEAD Evil GNU/Linux  */

Aryan Ameri



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