scr open sores

[simon wistow <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hark at my witty pun! 

Open Source is crap. It's like JeffK sez "Lunix si for hippies and
peopal who liek to spend all day downloading programs that dont work!"

JeffK be da man.

Seriously though. I keep being disapointed by Open Source. I maan, It's
not like I'm in love with Microsoft but at least stuff fucking works
(until it crashes). And the interfaces don't (as much) suck donkey jism.
I'd get a Mac but they crash even more, they only have 1 fricking mouse
button and Apple seem to be hell bent on the worst of both worlds that
is Mac OS X. (ObAside: I wonder if some one will port Platinum + the
Interface Guidelines to GnuStep - http://www.gnustep.org/ - rumour has
it there will be Mac OS X compatability at some point. I'm not holding
my breath) Plus they're too expensive, I don't like how they look (sue
me. Or should I say sosumi?) and I think the licence requires you to
purchase 1pr 3/4 length trousers, 1 AYB tshirt and sculpt your hair into
a messy peak. But veering wildly back on point let's hold up some of the
shiny paradigms of OS :

(and remember, I'm working solely on kwalitee, price is not a factor)

* Linux. 
It's shit. It's not actually as good as BSD (ok, so it's getting there
but they don't even have a good, stable VM). As a server OS it's good,
I'll give it that. It seems to be gaining a niche in the embedded
market. But, as a Desktop? Purleeeease. 


* Apache. 
It's actually pretty shit. Really. You can write your own HTTP server in
Perl which is faster. But it does have a huge extensible API. So Apache
2 is better but if a commercial company to $long_time to release its
next version which wans't as shit everybody'd scream blue murder. It
just happens to be better than everything else out there. 


* GCC
Have you looked at the ASM it produces? It's a joke. Plus it has huge
quantities of bugs. It's an amateurish compiler with an (admittedly)
nifty front end/back end decouplement (how many times have you actually
used that though) but it would be laughed out of any commercial compiler
or compiler research lab.

* Mozilla
/me raises an arched eyebrow


* Perl
Tricky one here. It's incredibly useful. But hang out on Perl 5 Porters
for a bit and you're amazed that it works. It's riddled with bugs, the
internal design is best described as, err, baroque. And it's completley
undocumented and showing its age. Perl 6 is doomed to failure IMO.  What
would have been better is cleanup + couple of new features + new shiny
parrot back end. 

c.f
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/23/damians.html
vs
http://217.158.50.178/docs/just_for_damians.html


But, as Damian Conway said, nobody wants to do that.
It's dull. Perchance the crux of the OS problems. You only do
interesting stuff - there's really no incentive to do the dull shit.
Which is why we have 100+ theming engines and a word processor that can
play Elite but no decent window manager / display engine and not a
single good mail client.