Re: considered harmful (was [off topic] Learning Shell from an old UNIX book)
At Sat, 15 Mar 2003 11:58:48 +0200,
Aryan Ameri wrote:
>
> 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.
Not bad. I'd say just "not ideal."
> 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.
Ligther than the OO.o suite: sodipodi (gtk) and karbon (kde). You
might also try using blender. But that would be 3D overkill.
> 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.
If by non-free development you mean fairly trivial stuff live
revision control, that's also good enough for me. But if by
development you mean using build system that *might* require you
to pay royalties.
Since Java has a non-free license, there's a risk that Sun might
be bought out by somebody less inclined to support free
software. Without finding a replacement for the Java stuff (which
some people appear to be already doing), how then can Debian,
Redhat and friends recompile OO.o to fix stuff like security
holes?
> 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?
Not quite the analogy you're looking for. You don't need AFAICT
non-free software to build your linux kernel. OTOH OO.o requires
Java to build.
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