Here's a couple of corollaries and effects of the charging problem that are worth mentioning (or at least that occurredto me).

The obvious corollary is how much more sensible the problem makesthe 'give away the service to build interest' approach often used byInternet startups. If people can't do anything with you before theyspend money, your window to get them interested enough to do so is verylimited (probably more or less one web page, at best). Giving them freeaccess gives

The more I use ZFS the less happy I become with it. It's not from anyissues with ZFS's features or with how it works in practice; ZFS isn'tone of those things that look better in theory than in practice. Basedon my exposure so far it pretty much does live up to its promise, andthe ZFS people are busy sanding off the rough edges and adding usefulfeatures.

My problem with ZFS is that if something goes wrong it all too oftengoes wrong in a

As I mentioned yesterday ,scripts in packaging systems are an opportunity to make mistakes. Thus,one thing that RPM could do to improve is to automate as many of thethings that are done repeatedly in install and removal scripts (of whichRPM has several variants).

There are two improvements that jump out at me. First, many packagesonly do things when they are being actually installed or removedinstead of being upgraded (and sometimes do other things during anupgrade). Right now people detect these cases by boiler

Once upon a time it was popular to laugh at package systems like RPMand say that all you really needed was ' make install '. This attitudemissed the point, because the importance of good package systems isthat they let you easily remove things .

This matters because it encourages experimentation with packages.If removing a package is difficult and painful, it's a fairly bigcommitment to just install a package in the first place. If removing apackage is easy and reliable, then installing packages is not at all