Tony, your ESR response post on Slashdot.

[mbpark]

Tony,

I've never seen such a good explanation of the Linux/Open Source/31337 h4x0r community.

You hit it right on the head. The people who are involved in Open Source want to have that barrier to entry so that everyone cannot get involved, because if they did, it wouldn't be l337 and cool andmore. The man pages for most of these products are also horrible too. They want to keep people who don't know or who are like me and don't have the time to hack C/C++ code and still do my job all day. I'm not beholden to any OS, and use four of them do do my job (Windows 2000, Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux).

I shouldn't need 3 O'Reilly books to configure Sendmail, or 2 to configure mySQL. Heck, Oracle 8i is easier to set up than many of these open source databases, even under linux! (And I've run mySQL under Linux and FreeBSD, and Oracle 8i under Solaris and Linux). I can use just one to configure Oracle. Sure, it's big, but it's one . Same with SQL Server 7.0 or 2000. The scary part is that both do a pretty good job of managing data.

This is a community that prides itself on making things hard to use, such as Debian Linux. Meanwhile, we've just swapped out all our Linux boxes for OpenBSD 2.7/2.8 because:

1. Man Pages actually explained the products and the OS in extreme detail. We were happy.
2. Ports system allowed us to install without hacking.
3. Everything worked the first time.
4. OpenSSH wasn't a royal pain to install.
5. Mark can spend his time planning, and not worrying about configuration issues.
6. BIND was a joy to configure on OpenBSD, as was networking.

I wanted to post as a corollary to what you said, because I find it very true. The Linux community seems to hate anyone who wants anything explained properly, and isn't going to get anywhere until people start doing so. It's an OS, and it has some features.

For me to claim it's the greatest OS ever would go against any shred of scientific objectivity and credibility that I have. I know that it gets it's butt whipped by *BSD, Solaris, Windows 2000, and QNX in many categories. However, it's an OS and has features. I don't believe in blind advocacy based on the GPL like most of the Linux community does (and I feel sorry for those that do).

Personally, I think that most people should just get over the "3l337ness factor" of open source and start working toward solutions. Then again, what would those open source people have cynicism toward next?

Mitch