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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!nntp.inet.fi!news.funet.fi!news.helsinki.fi!not-for-mail From: torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi (Linus Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: 25 Apr 1996 09:27:22 +0300 Organization: University of Helsinki Lines: 40 Message-ID: <4ln60a$vg@kruuna.helsinki.fi> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <Dpz1qL.n1G@deere.com> <kevinbDqC2K2.CAH@netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: kruuna.helsinki.fi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:22137 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:799 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3455 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3308 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:18002 comp.os.linux.advocacy:46855 In article <kevinbDqC2K2.CAH@netcom.com>, Kevin Brown <kevinb@netcom.com> wrote: > >The ultimate key to the server market is the client market. The >reason for that is that there are many more instances of clients than >servers, and the disparity between clients and servers will continue >to decrease as commodity hardware becomes more powerful and as client >OSes continue to gain server capabilities. Halleluja! The above comment needs to be framed and handed out to UNIX vendors (and others too, I ahve to admit). Anybody who concentrates on the server side of things is _dead_ in the water when the client people come loaded for bear. Nice graphical sysadmin programs aren't the answer. People will wade through sh*t up to their eyebrows and be _happy_ without them (yes, even your "average" user will accept cryptic and hard-to-use textual setup files if you have reasonable defaults: look at windows .ini files). Yet all the unix vendors fall over backwards to try to make some silly program that makes sysadmin look easy. Nobody really cares - I suspect that the standard "it's too hard to administer" thing people say is really a "there is nothing there I _want_ to administer", yet silly vendors keep doing the sysadmin programs.. STOP doing the damn glitzy admin stuff: it's a secondary issue at _most_ if even that. If you don't have the applications, people won't care about the admin stuff either, because there simply isn't anything they want to administer. The last two vendor unixes I saw (I won't name names) both came with graphical tools for doing disk striping etc. NEITHER of them had any applications loaded at _all_, and their shell didn't even have command line editing on by default (This is 1996, folks, we don't need no steenking editing facilities!). No wonder people flock away in droves and hope for the "saviour" NT - at least MS has been known to put a few games etc with the basic distribution. Linus