Users Want *Seamless* Solutions, Not Patchwork (was Re: Users want solutions, not buzzwords)

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "djb" == D J Bernstein <75628121832146-bind at sublist.cr.yp.to> writes:

    djb> The BIND company sells support services. It has a financial
    djb> interest in hard-to-use software. This is not a conspiracy
    djb> theory; it is a simple statement of the economic facts.

No, it's a bizarre fantasy of yours. What is the colour of the sky in
your planet, Dan? Fact: BIND existed long before Nominum ("the BIND
company") existed. [FYI Nominum is even younger than BIND8.] This
means that backwards compatibilty and looking after a huge installed
base constrains what can be done with the administrative interface to
the software. You wouldn't know or have to care about that for djbdns.
Fact: it's the ISC that "owns" BIND, not Nominum. The ISC's attitude
has been to concentrate on the functionality of the protocol
implementation rather than pretty user interfaces. As for your claim
of "hard-to-use", that's subjective and hard or anyone to properly
evaluate. Fact: The last time I loked at djbdns, I gave up because of
the rat's nest of interdependent daemons that had to be set up, not to
mention the weird format for its equivalent of a zone file. I found
that to be hard to use. Then again, I suppose you would expect me to
say that since I work for the BIND company. Finally, although Nominum
derives revenue from selling support (and would no doubt welcome
more), it is not the cornerstone of the company's business model. That
is an undisputed matter of fact too. Look at the profitability of many
of the other companies that have tried to make money from only selling
support on open source software. No matter how easy-to-use it
us. However that is measured. Nominum has a number of sources of
revenue -- programming contracts, consulting, training, DNS hosting
and others I can't talk about yet -- besides selling support.

Oh, and if you care to look at www.nominum.com, you will find several
customers who almost certainly do not find BIND "hard-to-use" yet have
chosen to buy support. Nobody compelled them to do that. They felt it
was a worthwhile thing to do obviously. Maybe you could ask them why?

    djb> The normal situation is that ssh is already working and rsync
    djb> is unnecessary. It is straightforward to download, compile,
    djb> and install daemontools, ucspi-tcp, and djbdns---much easier
    djb> than downloading, compiling, and installing BIND. You don't
    djb> need anything else.

That's right. Just download BIND, compile and install it. You don't
need anything else. :-) I think most administrators prefer to have
just one thing to install, like named, instead of a rat-tag bunch of
weirdly inter-related daemons that don't really seem to be necessary
other than to conform to the DJB ideology.