Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!ccicpg!turnkey!stanton!donegan
From: donegan@stanton.TCC.COM (Steven P. Donegan)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Binaries vs source, or UNIX vs PC's?
Summary: Binaries VS Source another opinion
Message-ID: <48@stanton.TCC.COM>
Date: 27 May 88 04:40:28 GMT
References: <3116@charon.unm.edu> <10226@ncc.Nexus.CA> <311@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu>
Organization: Stanton Public Domain Systems, Stanton, Ca.
Lines: 23


I am the proud hacker (old connotation) owner of quite a few diverse systems
and would like to put forward my points on binary vs source:

1) source can be (in lots of cases) ported between systems; a definite +

2) binaries can harbor nasty surprises (virus, trojan or other); a definite -

3) source can be very educational

4) binaries almost always are simply used to support the task they were
   designed for, not anything else.

And my final (mediocre) argument, I as a usenet site am not really interested
in passing on megabytes of binary which cannot be used by a large portion of
my leaf nodes.


-- 
Steven P. Donegan
Sr. Telecommunications Analyst
Western Digital Corp.
donegan@stanton.TCC.COM