[PLUG] Minutes of PLUG meet held on 05-0902009

[Sriram Narayanan]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 6:41 AM, Manas Alekar<maalekar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 2. Regarding the question of MOU, I think the government would quite
>> like to agree about shifting to free software. The main question for
>> them is 'how'. The issue is not what software they use to train the
>> teachers, but whether it is feasible for them to go through this
>> process logistically and economically. It is obvious that they don't
>> have in-house expertise to do the training and maintenance of the
>> computers. As of now, it seems like only MS has given them an
>> acceptable solution. And with the knowledge they have, the dilemma of
>> choosing between the lesser evil does not exist.
>>
>
> I hate to say this, but would can we recommend that the government go the
> FOSS way with a clean conscience? Nautilus still breaks once in a while when
> I update it. Evolution backends die on me randomly when I try to connect to
> EXCHG servers. Interfaces are still deprecated when deemed necessary.
> Perhaps we should start by taking a leaf out of Solaris' book. They still
> ship with Bourne (not Bourne Again) shell as the default.

INFO: Solaris' stablity is more because they have a stringent process
called the ARC [1].
Since they have a 7 year ABI guarantee, they have a policy on whether
interfaces are allowed to change to not [2]

Present day opensolaris ships with GNU bash and this inclusion was
subject to the ARC process as well.

> When it comes to
> huge organisations with inertia, corporate or otherwise, such things matter.

+1 to that. Reliability and stability matter a lot indeed.

>
> ~ Manas

[1] http://opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/
[2] http://opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/bestpractices/bp-interfaces/