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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
I think there's a pretty fair amount of 'not clear on the concept' - or, at the very least, 'not clear on the *advantages*' - going on here.
> but the fact that it requires some work and
> technical expertise to build the latest source on
> an open vendors public source repository is a
> *flaw*?
Well, it's a "flaw" if it's any harder than it needs to be to actually compile source - which, IME, isn't generally the case.
It's a "flaw" for the vendor, not for the distro, if the vendor's *goal* is to directly support end-users, because if the vendor's doing that, then the vendor should really either be maintaining their packages in major distros themselves, or should at least be offering friendly binary packaging (RPMs or .debs) on their own site.
> I have occasionally built from source, after
> fixing some bugs that were annoying me -
> and was very thankful that I had the option!
Options are always good, and I sincerely hope nobody's arguing with that. I've fixed things that bothered me in source also, and then submitted back upstream. Once or twice, my hack-handed fixes were even accepted. =)