Re: CD ripping

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 2:04 AM wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 10:52:27PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > Lee wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 9:38 PM Eben King wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > (& why is re-implementing something such a thing in linux??)
> >
> > Open source and no central control.
>
> The first part of the answer deserves a bit more: "open source" [1]
> makes that easy. You can mix and match bits and pieces of other
> programs to make that one you like and haven't found yet.
>

What you're not saying is that after you do your own one-of-a-kind software
Frankenstein you now own it.  You.  I suspect that more often than not you
end up in the same situation as Apache OpenOffice - an unmaintained mess.
They haven't been able to keep up with bug fixes since 2015.  Over 10
years!!!

So yes, free software is great.  ** IF ** you have the ability to maintain
it or you can find somebody that will maintain it for you.


>
> And since there's not "the best", but "the best for you and
> folks alike", this is a Good Thing :-)


But what happens when you don't have the ability to create your own best
version of whatever?
Free software doesn't look like so much of a Good Thing then..

What happens in a work situation when the person/people that were
maintaining some free software version of your own best version of
something leave?  "You're screwed" is what immediately comes to my mind..

For example, I loved RANCID (https://shrubbery.net/rancid/)  The people at
shrubbery.net were wonderful - I'd send them a patch and they'd usually
accept it.  Meaning that when the next version of rancid was released I
didn't have to do anything.  My changes were already incorporated in rancid
:)
But for all the changes they didn't accept I had to figure out how to make
my changes work in the new version.  Which usually wasn't too hard, but
there was a time or two it was a bit of a struggle.
Then I quit.  OhNoes!!! You might think it isn't all that hard to find
someone that knows bash scripting, or perl.. but this was a group of people
responsible for routing & switching.  Knowing how to configure BGP doesn't
mean you know the first thing about bash or perl.  And forget about
expect/tcl - who  knows how to do that now?  much less who knows that _and_
knows routing/switching?  I'm guessing not many people.  Certainly nobody
in the group that I left.

But enough.. Linux sux at backwards compatibility.  I need to just accept
that..

Regards
Lee