Folks,
I have to say, of all the lists I subscribe to, the vocal members of
this list are the most arrogant and insulting. However, I consider
comments such as Luca Gibelli's, bandwidth wasting, "We are happy to
suffer this loss." and Dennis Peterson's "His specific problem is he
lacks the skill to install and manage the product" reflect more about
the person making the comment, rather than the target.
I would also consider the prevalent attitude misplaced and wrong, and
before you berate me for knowing nothing, let me say this I've been
managing mail systems on Linux since the late 1.x releases and build and
support embedded Linux distros. If you're following the logic here,
that still doesn't prove that I know much, but at least I have some
background...
Somewhere between my teenage years and now, I have enough experience to
realize that I don't know everything. I can't create faster/better
optimized programs using assembler than a high level language, and I'm
not the worlds most knowledgeable Linux security expert. The many
packages that make up Linux are better understood by those who created
and maintain them and these people are the most qualified to produce
secure configurations of these packages. Even if I DID understand a
package better than the maintainer, or have a better grasp of security
than the person producing configuration, I would recognize that having
more people look at the configuration WILL improve the system. This is
one of the basic arguments of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
I no longer possess the desire to build Linux systems from scratch, or
to customize them so heavily that I cannot benefit from the work of some
of the greats in the community, although I may occasionally humbly make
suggestions that I think might be of benefit (some of these are not
necessarily accepted as such).
I'll further encourage these efforts because, having done this for a
while, I realize that it _IS_ now possible for someone who knows almost
nothing about Linux administration to take a distro, install it, update
it using one of the package managers and have a secure, if sub-optimal
installation, taking the defaults at installation. When I realize that
this person might otherwise have put Windows on the net and become
another spam and virus spewing Bot I feel that anything that can be done
to make the standard distros easier to use, and so to encourage their
uptake, is good.
And yet, when you suggest that one of the advances that ClamAV could
make is to be in a position to help these people, the responses
represent an elitist (and mis-guided) attitude that everyone should be a
highly skill sysadmin more knowledgeable of the ClamAV system.
So, now you have some more flamebait. I'm signing off, because, for the
vocal members of this list at least, Scott Adams seems to have the right
idea (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/):
"Let me begin by saying I don’t debate with advocates. An advocate says
that everything is right about one position and everything is wrong
about the other side. You might as well debate with a doorknob."
Jim
--
Jim Redman
(505) 662 5156 x85
http://www.ergotech.com
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