On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 2:04 AM wrote: > On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 10:52:27PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: > > Lee wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 9:38 PM Eben King wrote: > > [...] > > > > (& why is re-implementing something such a thing in linux??) > > > > Open source and no central control. > > The first part of the answer deserves a bit more: "open source" [1] > makes that easy. You can mix and match bits and pieces of other > programs to make that one you like and haven't found yet. >
What you're not saying is that after you do your own one-of-a-kind software Frankenstein you now own it. You. I suspect that more often than not you end up in the same situation as Apache OpenOffice - an unmaintained mess. They haven't been able to keep up with bug fixes since 2015. Over 10 years!!! So yes, free software is great. ** IF ** you have the ability to maintain it or you can find somebody that will maintain it for you. > > And since there's not "the best", but "the best for you and > folks alike", this is a Good Thing :-) But what happens when you don't have the ability to create your own best version of whatever? Free software doesn't look like so much of a Good Thing then.. What happens in a work situation when the person/people that were maintaining some free software version of your own best version of something leave? "You're screwed" is what immediately comes to my mind.. For example, I loved RANCID (https://shrubbery.net/rancid/) The people at shrubbery.net were wonderful - I'd send them a patch and they'd usually accept it. Meaning that when the next version of rancid was released I didn't have to do anything. My changes were already incorporated in rancid :) But for all the changes they didn't accept I had to figure out how to make my changes work in the new version. Which usually wasn't too hard, but there was a time or two it was a bit of a struggle. Then I quit. OhNoes!!! You might think it isn't all that hard to find someone that knows bash scripting, or perl.. but this was a group of people responsible for routing & switching. Knowing how to configure BGP doesn't mean you know the first thing about bash or perl. And forget about expect/tcl - who knows how to do that now? much less who knows that _and_ knows routing/switching? I'm guessing not many people. Certainly nobody in the group that I left. But enough.. Linux sux at backwards compatibility. I need to just accept that.. Regards Lee
