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Are You Opinionated?

I have had the opportunity to work in several different types of environments in my career. I started out working for the U.S. Congress at a support agency called the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA for short. And have since worked for a Wall Street bank, for a small con-sulting company at a multinational technology company and at Emu Software, the corporate sponsor of the open source system console project, NetDirector, that I Co-Founded in 2003. This diversity provides me with a perspective on the degree of “opinionatedness” that people have in different industries. No where, in my experience, are people even half as opinionated as they are in open source.

In open source, I’ve found that people tend to be *very* opinionated about just about *everything.* From which license is best (GPL, MPL, CDDL, Apache,...), to how much inter-operability with Microsoft is too much, to whether there is any need for Graphical User Inter-faces, or GUIs, to manage open source applications. This last one is very near and dear to my heart, because it is an issue we’ve wrestled with from the get-go at Emu Software. When we set out to deliver an easier, more “enterprise-class” way to manage things like Apache, Samba, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos, etc., especially in bigger networks where you want to configure more than one server at a time, we knew we would face some resistance from the “command line bigots.”

We also knew that, for NetDirector to be acceptable in environments with some of these folks present, there had to be a way for them to use NetDirector but still be able to configure manually. For quite some time, we wondered if it was even possible to accommodate both types of users - in one camp, those who are new to Linux and open source and so really want a nice user inter-face and, also in this camp, those who may be comfortable doing things manually, but who’s networks are growing faster (often *much* faster) than is the number of SysAdmins. In the other camp, the folks who, if stranded on a deserted island, would choose death before using a GUI to order a glass of water.

Then it hit us - why not put a button in the NetDirector main configuration screen titled “Edit Config File,” which, when clicked, brings up the flat file for the service the user is managing? The screenshot to the left show’s this for Samba. The nice thing about this compromise is that, once you’ve implemented NetDirector, everyone on the IT team can use one tool that lets them manage their Linux (and Solaris) boxes in the way that’s most comfortable for them - no judg-ments. If you want a point-and-click way to set up a new Samba share across several branch of-fice servers, you got it. If it’s just as fast for you to do it manually and then copy and paste the new config, that works, too. In both cases, NetDirector’s embedded database does the revision control for you, so if something goes wrong, getting back to the previous state is a click away. And, in both cases, you can schedule the change to take effect in the future with the drop down calendar.

With this as background, you’ll understand why when I read Jason Brooks' retrospective on his review of RHEL 5 in eWeek, I just had to pipe up (I guess I’m opinionated, too). Jason de-scribes an exchange with a reader who thinks that Jason’s desire for good GUI tools in RHEL is misplaced. I think Jason does a nice job describing the need for a balance between GUI and CLI - something we put into practice with NetDirector. And so I posted a comment to this effect on Jason's blog. You can read his article and my post here. So, if you’re opinionated, too, why not add your 2 cents?

http://blogs.eweek.com/brooks/content/was_i_too_tough_on_rhel.html#comments

Greg Wallace
EMU Software

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Comments

I agree that open source should be "open" to both the GUI and CLI audiences. However, how has your approach worked out so far? Is there a happy medium that works for both groups?

Posted by: Ghost Blogger [TypeKey Profile Page] | May 29, 2007 01:41 PM

better than asking me, ask our users. you can post this quesion on the forum at www.netdirector.org

or download the product and form your own opinion, and then tell me the answer...

Greg

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