Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux and winning

Author:Oliver Wrede
Posted:3/6/1999; 6:39:02 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 3/5/99
Msg #:3708 (In response to 3698)
Prev/Next:3707 / 3709

It'll be a lot of years before Linux is that user-friendly, and by then Bernie and I will be old men smoking cigars...

It'll be a lot of years more before Linux (resp. UNIX) is going to vanish as the primary OS for server applications. You force your potential Frontier customers to drop UNIX or hire NT staff, when they want to use Frontier for serving/developing content management systems.

I am actually a Win/Mac user. I never consider Linux for the user end. But when it comes to the server side of the story, I'd never vote for NT or MacOS, unless there is no other choice. In every case I can remeber, the only reason why we had to take NT or MacOS was, because the software vendor did only port his application to NT and there was no way to use an alternative product. In every other case, we were able to do anything we could think of with UNIX, but not with NT/MacOS!

NT/MacOS do not integrate into existing enviroments very well. They always want to persuade you to invest in a homegenous enviroment on the log run. The market and the pricing politics are seperated by the OSes not by the applications! People change apps more frequently than their OS.

When Frontier stays on the Win/Mac area, I will always see it as a client app -- no matter what server features you can deliver, because UNIX systems are still the primary choice for the servers. I'd rather kick Frontier and option for a UNIX scripting instead of switching to NT!

UNIX has a tendency to trap you, when you apply too much customizations to your project. Suddenly you have to update your projects each time your software vendor updates the software... that's bullshit! So being able to use standard products instead of custom scripts on the UNIX side is a strong argument.

On NT this gets even worse: "Please install Service Pack 3 but do not install Option Pack 4 or 'Vendor Inc.' will not gurantee the proper operation of the product!".

No. I have the strong opinion, that Frontier should stay a concept, which is available OS-independent. The concept is the core value of Frontier - not the fact, that it is available on this or that platform! When I talk with smart people about Frontier, no one is interested in the OS question. When they recognize the difference and they consider buying it, they ask "Does it run on any OS?".

I am not interested in integreation with the OS, when this means, I have to deal with OS issues, while I actually want to deal with application issues. On NT, I am always dealing with OS issues, when I want to do something fancy.

If the user interface ist the problem for Frontier on UNIX, why don't you consider an app without user interface? What I imagine is a standalone deamon, which has an interface to the network (not necessarily to the screen)! It'd have to deal with the GDBs and answer requests coming over the network -- that's all I need! This would be a good starting point. I could develop my websites on an NT machine an serve them from a UNIX host.

I'd like to have such a frontier deamon. I don't need a UI for UNIX. With such a Frontier deamon for UNIX, I could go to ANY provider here and ask him to run that deamon on my server.

I do not have this choice, so I never ever considered Frontier to be something else than a nice text-rendering app... all that funky XML-RPC and search-engine stuff is almost worthless -- too much hassle, when you deal with ISPs who do not want to run NT. (and I can understand this position very well, because ISP have other priorites)

I think you are making a big mistake, when you completly stick to NT/Mac.

Oliver

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