using a mac with linux and filepro

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Esak" <john at valar.com>
To: "Filepro-List at Lists. Celestial. Com" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 12:34 AM
Subject: RE: using a mac with linux and filepro


>
> John Esak said:
>
>> > If you are of the Linux ilk that feels everything should be free and
>> > cost nothing...
>>
>
> Walter Vaughan said:
>
>> Actually I've spent more on software this year than i've spent in
>> the past 20
>> years combined. It's just that I'm not interested unless I have
>> the source code
>> anymore.
>>
>> Open source isn't a panecea. It's not at all about free stuff.
>> It's about the
>> upstream contributions.
>
> Rubbish... at exactly what level of coding do you think you exist? I doubt
> you are capable of producing the simplest driver for the simplest "open
> source" project you "own". Nor is nearly one in a million of the "users" 
> out
> there who claim the same nonsense you do.  Sorry, please put up  some of
> your own "open source" contributions that have been added to any open 
> source
> project you own... and I will take back my refutation of your argument.

You are absolutely wrong John.
Thats not rhetoric or religeon or anything subjective or anything involving 
personalities, it's a simple fact that can be shown a million ways and has 
been shown over and over since the first ape used a stick to do something 
better than before the tool was invented.

This open source way of doing things is just another form of technological 
advancement.
In this case it's an advancement of the way to develop and distribute 
software.

The system as a whole provides so much benefit to so many people, that even 
plain old non-contributing end users provide value just by causing this 
system to be popular and thus used, and thus useable.

Even if I never contributed a line of code ever anywhere, it's still the 
right thing to do to support the use of free software by using free 
software, because it's a Good Thing that all this powerful software is out 
there for us to use, freeing everyone invest on other things that build on 
top of it. Without that, progress would be far slower and that would be bad 
for all, right on down to ultimate end users who have nothing to do with 
computers, since this kind of software is like electricity. It's everywhere 
and in everything when it's free everyone can have it and when it's open 
source it both gets more powerful/featureful at a rate that traditional 
software can't even come close to and gets bugfixed more thoroughly and 
faster than tradtional software can come close to.

If I had to spend $1500 on my base OS, then thats $1500 I don't have for an 
application like VSI-FAX to run on it. Sorry SCO, but, yay for Esker.
(It's just gravy that in the bargain, that free os runs rings around SCO in 
any metric you want to measure. SCO isn't even more reliable or less ongoing 
maintenance any more.)

Move up a few years and I don't need vsi-fax anymore either. Sorry Esker, 
but, yay for PC-Miler.
Granted my hylafax system lacks features vsi-fax has and the pcl interpreter 
is weaker, but it's doing the job and it's a safe assumption by now (after 
watching the progress of much much free software over the last several 
years) that it's going to get better. And failing that, I do know, since I 
have the code in my hand, that I always have the option to improve it myself 
or hire programmers to.

As time goes on, you can pay for higher and higher level things, because 
things you used to have to buy become available for free. And the over all 
standard of living goes up and up and up. Without that progression of things 
becoming free, allowing everyone to move on to invest in even more advanced 
things that use and build on top of the old things, progress would happen 
but be be far slower and the standard of living would improve but much less.

That progression of what once was expensive is now free or very cheap, is 
perfectly good and necessary. It's just like the progression of technology 
itself.
It's exactly the same as how motors put horses out of buisiness, and we are 
all better off for it.
It's exactly the same as how robot arms put lots of factory laborers out of 
business, and we are all better off for it.
Every technology put someone out of business, and gave the whole world 
something in return starting with teh first ape that used a stick to do 
something more effectively than before the tool was invented.

So, Assertion A, Whether or not I did an effective job proving it, The basic 
system or model of open source software development and distribution is 
better for everyone than what came before. Or at least it's better for 
everyone that it exists and the more software that moves into that category 
the better. I grant that it might not be 100% true to call the open source 
model simply "better", because it might still be that it wouldn't be better 
for everyone if that were the _only_ way software could be developed. Some 
software maybe just could never get developed via the open source model, but 
I don't beleive it, aside from say, secret government projects which would 
be closed for wholly different reasons than economics.

Next, Assertion B, The more people use a certain thing, the more 
advantageous it is for others to use it.
The advantages come in many forms by many vectors, direct and indirect. I'll 
assume I don't have to explain or prove that one.
One proof is thats exactly how MS managed to own everything in sight. They 
kept doing whatever was necessary to ensure that everyones only _real_ 
choice was windows and other MS staples, because thats what everyone _else_ 
was using and you have to interoperate with everyone else smoothely or else 
you can't compete.
If your new secretary can't work your word processor and your customers 
can't _effortlessly_ view your documents, and your OS can't run the 
application that your business could really benefit from, then you are not 
effectively competeing with everyone else and thats death. Conversely, in 
the IT infrastructure world, since everyone is using apache, apache has the 
best pool of support, knowledge, experienced and capable users that can get 
jobs done with it, and so, today, you have everyone using something free 
instead of everyone using something that they all had to pay MS (or 
somebody) for, and everyone using something that lets them do whatever they 
want and can be hacked and enhanced and fixed or customized at will instead 
of something that is what it is and we all have to just live within it's 
limits. Thats a huge difference because it's multiplied by every web server 
out there, including the zillions of web servers and miriad of special 
purpose little things that just happen to incorporate an httpd, that 
otherwise wouldn't have even existed to be counted.

So, if a given thing is better for everyone, and if the more people that use 
a given thing the more likely it is that everyone will use it, then anything 
that promotes that things use is also a benefit to everyone.

Merely using some piece of open source software, without doing anything 
else, ends up promoting the use of not only that software, which on it's own 
provides benefit to everyone, but open source software in general, and thus 
the whole system that created it. That provides even vaster & far reaching 
benefit to everyone.

In my case, I can actually claim to go a tad further than being a user, or 
even a user who "supports" buy buying services from Suse or someone.
And it has to do, coincidentally enough, specifically with PuTTY.

You are right, PuTTY lacks features that several commercial apps have.

We have a largely subscription based business now, scattered over several 
boxes.
One particular box happens to need a passwd entry for every user everywhere 
and the other day I notived that that boxes passwd file was 1643 lines long.

All those users log in to some box with some kind of terminal emulator, and 
it needs features putty doesn't have. In fact mainly the useful choices are 
down to FacetWin and Anzio (AnzioLite is good enough).

One final desired, if not strictly necessary feature makes it come down to 
FacetWin.
In order to provide the best user experience, and because it would be a 
nightmare if each one of them needed very much personal attention just to 
get installed or to change laptops or to log in from a friends house or 
etc.... we need the terminal emulator to be an effortless install. Part of 
that means no serial numbers or licence/activation keys nor any special 
protected limited access web page. In the case of FacetWin, the licences are 
kept on the server, and the client part installs and works fully without any 
licence/serial/activation keys and FacetWin specifically allows you to hand 
out the installer, or, just link to the installer on their own web site.

FacetWin can be anywhere from $125 to $200 per seat! and the pain in the ass 
I have to go through keeping track of all the 5 10 50 20 user licences that 
have added up over the years, and the pain in the ass on the phone with 
Linda (first name basis with the licence person, hmm) every time I want to 
move, change, fix, upgrade a server to re-activate the facetwin licences and 
prove to facetcorps satisfaction that I really did take a server down and 
this really is a new box, or that its the same box but I simply _changed 
it's IP address!!!_  and if I do any of this and can't get facetwin on the 
phone because it's not 9AM central m-f  yet... UGH! I have too many boxes 
now,and the number is growing, and too much demand for redundant backup 
boxes ready that are ready to be used on 0 notice, and too much demand for 
shuffling users between boxes to redistribute load or to allow for hardware 
upgrades etc, that I can't tolerate this license nonsense any more. This 
isn't 1992 with a single box that doesn't get touched for years at a time 
and only 15 users in one company to worry about putting out of work for an 
hour or a day. [1]

And for the priviledge of sufferring all that inconvenience and shackles on 
my flexability and power to provide the best service to my users, I would 
have to pay $287,525.00 just to log in? What collossal load of really useful 
stuff could we do with $287,525 if we didn't need it just to log in? Just to 
log in!!! Thats not one line of _application_, which is the only real point 
to a computer! It could be less, almost as little as $100/seat, if we knew 
for a fact what user we were going to need and bought 1500 seats all in one 
shot. A mere $150,000 gamble back when we were small enough to only have 100 
or 200 users. Yeah that would be safe. Then we couldn't buy servers to put 
those seats ON for a while but can't have everything I guess...

So, back when we still only had under 200 users the math was already simple 
and the writing was on the wall, and so for rediculously far less than the 
cost of the admittedly good commercial product, we paid about $2,000 to some 
contract programmers to add a few features to PuTTY, And now, thats it. 
Thats not $2,000 for 200 users, which is already a staggering win at a mere 
$10 / user vs $175. Or even $2000 for 1643 users, which is positively silly. 
Thats $2,000 one time for all users till the end of time. And we are growing 
and packing on more users at a good rate every day. Some things that 
facetwin did we actually handled a different way on the server side withe 
filepro application code and cgi istead of in putty itself and so the 
enhancements are only partly useful to anyone else yet and we haven't 
decided to put the work back into the public domain yet, but even if we 
never give out the work we had done, the numbers are so staggeringly obvious 
that anyone else with even a paltry 25 or so users could just do the same 
thing on their own.

This was only possible because PuTTY existed, which in turn was only 
possible because gazillions of people were cheap and didn't want to pay $20 
to $200 if they could avoid it, and one of them finally wrote a free 
emulator, which in turn was only possible because he didn't have to pay a 
lot for a compiler...and so on....

Granted, the features we needed most were admittedly simple and few. The end 
result is _not_ a free facetwin or free anzio.
Anzio for instance has gobs of very advanced stuff that would have cost I'm 
sure a lot more that 2k just for any single one of them. All we really 
needed was run-program escape sequence, a way to launch a preconfigured 
login from a web page, and a tweak to the passthru-print <-> windows print 
spooler behaviour. Those were all trivial compared to printwizard, or even 
say the more recent twain stuff or the tapi or mapi stuff, or any of 50 
other less visibly flashy features.

But forget the money... As ludicrous as that is to say.

These days we are having a rather common problem with end users isp's idling 
out tcp sessions after only a few minutes. This is happening in the ISP 
outside of anyones control. It's been demonstrated empirically and simply 
that it's not some setting in an ones dsl modem or router. Some isp's just 
plain do it for all of an entire class of connection. Verizon dsl being the 
biggest culprit around here but not the only one. Optimum cable does it 
after 1.5 hours too but thats at least sufferable.
In neither case am I talking about the entire et connection btw. I mean 
individual tcp sessions, when idle for a few minutes for dsl, or 1.5 hours 
for cable, are being cut by the isp, having nothing to do with other tcp 
sessions or the connection as a whole.
FacetWin, neither the sever nor the client does any kind of keep-alive 
heartbeating or pinging. And they are both proprietary and neither can be 
used without the other.
So, end users who log in from verizon dsl connections, if they use facetwin, 
they get continuously ungracefully blown out of programs they are in. The 
locked records and headless processes on the servers... ugh...  Meanwhile 
putty has a simple little common setting that many many other telnet/ssh 
clients have that sends a null packet to the server every so many seconds. 
And/or from the other end, both telnet and ssh servers can send heartbeat 
"are you still there?" queries to clients, who respond if they are there. 
Either of those forms of traffic keeps the tcp session from being idle and 
can be configured to happen often enough so that verizon dsl never drops the 
session unless the user wants to or when its ok to for some other reason 
like their pc shut off. So, even if putty didn't happen to have that 
feature, as an open source user:
a) I had several other chances not to have this problem, or to address this 
problem effortlessly, because the server daemon is also open source, and I 
have my choice of several types of server daemon (telnet, ssh, rlogin) and 
at least a few different versions of each of those (stock telnetd, 
mit-kerberos version, others..., same for rlogin, same for ssh) as well as 
putty. if any one of those had the needed feature, I'm saved.
b) worst case, nothing had the feature, I could get it added myself to 
something, server daemon or putty. Thats physically impossible with 
facetwin, and yes I have requested the feature and explained it's necessity 
to facetwin, years ago, and was of course told, "sorry".
I'm one little guy and it's not worth their time to do stuff like that for 
me, but it's sure worth my time to do it for myself, and the needed feature 
is probably simple enough to impliment as a tweak to an existing app, that I 
could actually do it or afford to have it done. But the possibility needs to 
exist to do it for myself. And it's only because of the open source Alices 
Restaurant type "Movement" that that possibility does in fact now exist at 
least some of the time.

There is just absolutely no way you can say this is not the most logical and 
practical and forward thinking and good-for-the-world way to operate.
It begets further goodness every minute it goes on and with every little app 
that the open source community decides to re-impliment a free version of 
something that everyone used to have to pay for.

It's not that paying for software or for programmers brains and time is bad. 
It's not that it's somehow reasonable to expect a lot of value for nothing. 
Lots of work still has to be done by simply paying programmers to do it. 
It's just that the model for how software gets paid for and how the work 
gets done, and how the result gets distributed, is changing to a more 
efficient model that is more beneficial to more people.

Now, if an organization or consortium pays some programmers whatever it 
takes to get a big project done, and everyone gets to use the result for 
free and without limits after that, it's still worth it for the ones who put 
up the initial investment even though lots of other people will get to mooch 
the rewards too. And there is a larger beneficial result that now there 
exists some powerful new app that all companies of that industry can use, 
which benefits all people who use that industries goods or services, because 
the whole industry got better. Say some dairy farmers get together and 
sponsor a college student project to write a better process control system. 
Out pops a system thats better and provides better, more consistent product 
& quality control with less waste and tracks cows health more accurately and 
spots possible safety risks sooner and more perfectly etc,..
Not only does this better system now exist at all, which was probably only 
possible because of all the high quality free software the students used to 
build the system out of, but now every little mom & pop dairy farmer can use 
this state of the art system instead of just one or a few big guys. That 
ends up benefitting all milk drinkers or consumers of any products that even 
have milk in them. That is happening in gosh every kind of endeavor 
everywhere that uses any kind of software for anything. Not just every 
business or industry, but every school, every cientific study, every 
government agency, every no profit organization,... This doesn't just touch 
every person, it touches them all in many many different ways.


Conversely, the same benefit from community contribution does not work 
nearly as much for commercial apps, or even free closed source ones.
Years ago I actually wrote a simple little freeware app myself. The complete 
app not even just an improvement to something else that you think is so 
impossible to imagine for some reason.
It was very simple admittedly. The complete app was a couple small c files 
and a couple miscelaneous data and image files. I can just about spell C on 
a good day after lots of coffee and V-8 and vitamins etc...
But it worked and was easier than life without it, and well worth the time 
to write just for myself, let alone the time for a mere user to download.
But it never went anywhere. Mostly not because of how crude my 
implimentation was, no one else ever did a better implimentation or any 
other implimentation better or worse at all. As far as I know its the only 
app that ever even tried to do this one little thing.
It also wasn't from lack of exposure. By the time I did this Freshmeat was 
already a very popular site and I submitted it and it had it's moment in the 
spotlight where for a week every freshmeat user could see it in the list of 
new stuff for that day and that week.

The real reason it never went anywhere is because it was an add-on to a 
closed source app that practically no one used because why should they? When 
they could instead invest in an open source alternative? The app was an 
early version of Real Media encoder, which was 100% closed and proprietary, 
and I just made a gui front-end for it that made it easy to use, which it 
really needed. Real could make smaller files than anything else for a while 
way back then. mp3 either didn't exist yet or didn't have a free encoder 
yet, which was why I was using real, but mp3 both existed and had free 
encoders and was good enough to compete size and quality wise very soon 
after that so I stopped using it myself even. Why make end users of my sound 
files download the single proprietary realplayer, which being proprietary 
could turn not-free or nasty in some other way at any time, instead of 
letting them choose any of the countless mp3 players of their choice, if I 
didn't have to anymore?  (which it in fact did, the relplayer installer, and 
installed app, was positively a pestilence for a few years and is still 
quite a nuisance today) The encoder, being closed source, everyone correctly 
judged to ultimately be a bad investment. A dead end. The gui for the dead 
end product was thus also a dead end product. And so almost no one ever 
wasted any of their time on either one. All perfectly correct too.

Meanwhile, a pathetic few lines of code that I helped work out, (or the 
mutated descendants that do the same job, this was 2.0 days I think), part 
of a keyboard driver for the special extra keys on an IBM "rak" rapid 
application keyboard, one of the earliest keyboards with extra keys, is 
still in the linux kernel today, mainly because _that_ work was adding to 
something the community gets to keep forever, wheras the entire real encoder 
app was adding to something that ultimately does not benefit anyone but 
RealMedia.

You may not like it, but the crucible of Darwin renders all opinions 
irrelevant, and Darwin is proving out the model.

Walter is absolutely ridiculously correct for striving to get as much of his 
needs met with open source software as possible. Correct for himself, his 
company, his companies customers, and everyone else in the world, no matter 
what he uses it for and no matter if he never writes a single line of code 
that gets back into the software for everyone else.
Thats still the best investment for all concerned.
If nothing else he becomes one more person whose knowledgeable about say, 
mysql.

Purely as an end user needing to buy an app or hire an IT staff, and all 
else being equal, say mysql and ms-sql provided exactly the same features, 
reliability, efficiency, etc...
It's still better for me if the market consists of 100 guys who know all 
about something free and open source, than if the same 100 guys were just as 
good with something expensive and closed-source. Or even free and 
closed-source. If nothing else I'm more flexible and at less risk of being 
extorted or screwed or left high & dry some day with the open source stuff. 
And it's not a case of nothing else. All else is not equal by a long shot, 
so it's a complete no-brainer.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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