Senor Barborito wrote:

sfg wrote:

i hope this guide will save you a lot of time in picking out which 'open source software' you might have the misfortune to have to choose between.


step 1:
how enthusiastic are the promoters?

the more enthusiastic they are about the product, the crappier it probably is.

step 2:
does eric s. raymond have anything to do with it? are his quotes on the front page?

watch out. you might enter the 'libertarian' version of life, where nobody is obligated
to do anything for anybody, like , say, tell the truth about what a function does.

step 3:
are there a lot of flamewars about this product vs another product?

chances are, both products are shit. if there is a huge war on usenet or
some other place about the 'advantages/disadvantages' just try to imagine
that these people are two drunken men trying to convince you that
they are better at sex.

step 4:
is there an instruction manual online?

chances are, if they hide the instruction manual in some kind of tar.gz file,
pdf, obscure 'presentation' program, or even powerpoint, it means they
were too embarassed to put it on the web.

step 5:
are there scant instructions on the web, and the product is kind of under development,
but somehow there is still a 400 page book about it?

this is called 'scamming you'. this book is a waste of money, because it is 400 pages
of clearly written examples and screenshots of something that doesnt work. wait
until the program actually does something, then maybe instructions will be useful.

tragically, many nerds, especially open source ones, have a really really screwed up
idea about what 'understandable' and 'legible' means. they seem to have bits
and pieces of the proper idea going, but cant quite grasp how irrelevant that makes
their efforts. like a housecleaner who scrubs the floor but not the toilets.

example, you might find instructions that are in 5 different formats, automatically
generated from some kind of proto-language like xml or rdf. thus there is html, html.tgz,
pdf, postscript, etc, of the manual. but the manual itself has no index, table of contents,
or page numbers, and is 25% screenshots and 25% 'yet to be written'.

you might on the other hand find extensive and detailed descriptions of every option in the
program, down to the minutest detail.... but no overall description of how to use the program
or what the point of it is.

you might find a 5 page philosophical diatribe on the design decisions that go into the product,
and then find that a bunch of the commonly used functions have no instructions.

you might find that there are no examples, or that the examples are wrong and do not work.

all of these things are warning signs that the product is crap and you should avoid it.

Not always the case, but there is some truth to this.

A couple of opensource products rated to get you started off (mouseover the link for what it's used for):

PostgreSQL - not enthusiastic, great in all respects - unlike MySQL this is a fully ANSI SQL compliant RDBMS, though a tad bit slower massive anecdotal evidence suggests it tends to scale better. Closest thing to a 'free Oracle' out there.

Gimp - only slightly enthusiastic, and the product mildly sucks - available for Windows (ugly) (install this, then this).



Postfix - not enthusiastic, great (needs a touch more documentation)
Popa3d - not enthusiastic, good and minimalist, perfectly serviceable for what it does and nicely secure.
OpenOffice.org - just a touch enthusiastic, 'good, not great' - available for Windows (not ugly)
Apache - not enthusiastic, the it is Lord God Almighty - available for Windows (not GUI, and still rules)
Bind - not enthusiastic, a steaming pile of shit. The heaving, bulky, awkward 'sendmail' of DNS servers, this is nonetheless the backbone for the Internet's DNS system.
DJBDNS - enthusiastic and an eric s. raymond-class brainwashed philosophy-spouting asshole/fucktard and easily the most brilliant cryptographer in this decade, product is (somehow, and amazingly) great (beware the installation, though).
qmail - same guy, same quality, same everything.
OpenBSD - complicated. Somewhat enthusiastic, highly religious (anti-GPL). The documentation (avail. on the website) is probably the best seen in any opensource OS or indeed project since the dawn of man, the quality is fantastic on two conditions - a) you like a command-line interface (since this is a server or firewall OS not a user OS, that's sort of a given), and b) you don't need SMP. C+ if either of those apply, A if they don't.
OpenSSH - same people as OpenBSD, same enthusiasm, even better quality. This is quite simply an Apache-level success that has taken over the Internet and is now a piece of critical infrastructure. OpenSSH is the sort of program that makes you want to believe Jesus writes opensource software, and that's an understatement.
Putty - not enthusiastic, quite simply the best opensource OpenSSH/SSH/telnet client available for Windows. There is nothing Putty cannot do - very simple and easy to use, with a nicely customizeable interface.
Debian - slightly enthusiastic, highly religious, more difficult than OpenBSD to install well, the quality is undeniably there nonetheless.

If someone else wants to do Jabber/Gaim/etc., that'd be cool. These are just the ones I know.

--SB