Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful

[bd139]

Check out LLVM licensing and who built it and tell me we wouldn’t have had open source stuff...

Most companies positively want to give away stuff to the community other than their core business. It benefits everyone and their own reputation.

Most of the bad corporate press comes from a few vile assholes (SCO)

In fact in the last decade I have been paid over £100k to contribute to open source projects. Don’t get that kind of investment by pissing off your customers. Then look at redhat who just hired all the maintainers this circumventing the whole license thing.

Humans are mostly not shitty.

[Karel]

I think no software should be GPL licensed as it removes practical freedoms. Call me religious if you want everyone

The endusers of the software is usually a bigger group than the developers of that software.
Also, endusers are usually not programmers.

So, from the viewpoint of the endusers, the GPL provides ultimate freedom.
The GPL prevents the possibility that somebody takes some software, adds an interesting and nice feauture to it and starts to ask money for it, without providing the source to the buyer.
Because that takes away the freedom from the enduser to use the evolved software as he likes to do e.g. install it on as many computers he wants,
modify the source of the new features to accomodate other usecases, etc. etc.

[bd139]

He still has the original software so he can choose to use or accept that or pay money for the one with extra features.

Isn't choice a fundamental freedom?

[borjam]

Borjam is correct though. Most of the maintainers I’ve spoken to over the years picked GPL because it was the one they had heard about. Not because of explicit ideology. If that’s not a faith argument I don’t know what is.

We must run in different circles, because that is completely different to what the people I've talked about this have said.  Cultural differences?

Must be, but I swear under penalty of perjury and a one year sentence of using OS/2 that it's an accurate description of what I've seen.

The funny thing is, it became something even religious.

You ascribe it to religion, because you dislike it for personal reasons.  That is intellectually dishonest.

Preposterous. Where did I say that I dislike the GPL license?

That's how your text reads to me, that's all.  If you want, I can reword myself:

"You seem to find it distasteful and anti-intellectual when people choose the GPL license, because you ascribe the choice to religion."

Preposterous generalization!!

I am not talking about a developer chosing a license. I am talking about a user deciding wether to use a piece of software depending on its open source license and regardless of its merits. These people I am talking about (and in the late 90's it was quite frequent or I am a magnet for weirdos!) would choose Internet Information Server over NGINX if the former had a GPL license and the latter BSD or any other open source license.

A user doesn't choose a license. A user can choose a software package based on different criteria, one of them the license. In the case of the fanatics I met (and some of them confronted me during a FreeBSD advocacy talk) the license was the main reason above others. And, as I said, none of them was a lawyer (neither am I!).

There is nothing religious about the license choice.  Even if people were to simply pick the license they've heard most about, that would be lazy and conformist, perhaps; nothing at all to do with religion.  And you know that; yet you use the term as a denigrating label.  That is, as far as I understand, the very definition of intellectual dishonesty.  Low manipulation using terms loaded with emotional connotations.

Alright, if you dislike the religious word, it was irrational. Doubly irrational because the choice of an open source license is a bit irrelevant if you are only intending to use something. If you want to contribute to the project it can be an entirely different matter of course.

However, should all software be GPL licensed? Not at all.

Why are you telling that to me? I've already stated I use several licenses myself, so obviously I don't think all software should be GPL licensed.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you say it.

BSD license is an excellent choice for example for low-level interface libraries, language standard libraries, device drivers, and so on, where the initial adoption is more important than the risk of having incompatible closed-source derivatives.

Being open source at all is not always an option, either.  Sometimes selling licenses is the only way to fund the development and support.  It is a perfectly valid business model, nothing wrong in it.

So we're in the same boat here

If the Linux ecosystem used BSD instead of GPL, it would not be where it is right now.  Claiming otherwise is ignoring FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and the other BSD variants, and their project history; wishful thinking not based on real world experiences.  That is why I find this kind of discussion so hilarious and annoying at the same time.

I am not sure the license is so relevant. If I am not wrong Linux was released at an especially critical time: when BSD was hampered by legal disputes and, at the same time computers powerful enough to run a Unix like operating system comfortably were becoming mainstream.

(I was certainly alive and aware at that time but I am notoriously bad at remembering timings, so a this-one-came-first coming from me is completely unreliable).

[Nominal Animal]

Check out LLVM licensing and who built it and tell me we wouldn’t have had open source stuff...

Keep putting words in my mouth, why don't you?

I did not claim by any stretch that "we wouldn't have had open source stuff".  I said that looking at the history and evolution of the various BSD projects, it looks like GPL-based projects have been much more successful in getting/keeping many senior developers involved.  (By "senior", I mean those who have something significant to contribute.)

Most companies positively want to give away stuff to the community other than their core business.

No, they want to make as much money they can (or risk shareholder lawsuits); contributing to open source projects just happens to be a net positive for several reasons.

Then look at redhat who just hired all the maintainers this circumventing the whole license thing.

Well, it's not like the developers it did hire are from the capable end of the spectrum, looking at their contribution history.

There's still hope that when the crappiness crosses some magic threshold, someone gets fed up with it and produces something much better to replace it.  Not even RedHat can do anything about it when that happens. That's what happened with git, for example.

Humans are mostly not shitty.

You just haven't met enough of them.  Almost all humans are stupid, shortsighted, selfish, and definitely shitty.  Some individuals occasionally surprise by doing something better, often by accident.  But, because we ourselves are just as shitty as everyone else, we keep the bar low, so we don't need to admit it out loud.

[BradC]

The GPL prevents the possibility that somebody takes some software, adds an interesting and nice feauture to it and starts to ask money for it.

I don't think you quite understand the GPL. It in no way prevents anyone doing as you suggest. What it does do is *require* that the source code (or an offer for the source code) is offered to the person receiving the binaries.

So if I take your software, add a couple of features to it and sell it to Fred Bloggs, I *must* offer Fred Bloggs a copy of the source (potentially for a nominal fee to cover distribution only). I don't have to offer that source to anyone else and I don't have to give it back to you. What I *can't* do is place any encumbrance on the source I provide to Fred (for a nominal fee), so if he decides to post it to the world it's his choice.

Once of the recent GPL shitstorms was precisely that, where a company was offering custom hardened linux kernels. They *had* to offer/provide the source to those that paid them for the code. What they were trying to do was threaten those people into not passing it on. ie, "you post our code and we'll no longer supply you". You can't do that.

(*edit), Well actually you _can_ do that, but you then upset a lot of people which in the end doesn't do your business any favours. So I suppose it all works out in the end.

[Karel]

The GPL prevents the possibility that somebody takes some software, adds an interesting and nice feauture to it and starts to ask money for it.

I don't think you quite understand the GPL. It in no way prevents anyone doing as you suggest. What it does do is *require* that the source code (or an offer for the source code) is offered to the person receiving the binaries.

I understand the GPL quite well, thank you very much. I edited my former comment and I repeat it here:

The endusers of the software is usually a bigger group than the developers of that software.
Also, endusers are usually not programmers.

So, from the viewpoint of the endusers, the GPL provides ultimate freedom.
The GPL prevents the possibility that somebody takes some software, adds an interesting and nice feauture to it and starts to ask money for it, without providing the source to the buyer.
Because that takes away the freedom from the endusers to use the evolved software as he likes to do e.g. install it on as many computers he wants,
modify the source of the new features to accomodate other usecases, etc. etc.

[BradC]

I understand the GPL quite well, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

[Marco]

Check out LLVM licensing and who built it and tell me we wouldn’t have had open source stuff...

Basically LLVM grew out of the monomaniacal vision of Chris Lattner. Apple couldn't reasonably adopt it without adopting him, even if they could do it without his knowhow and network of developers to poach. If you hand it to some new leader, the first thing he wants to do is put his own brand on it instead of just developing it ... and it would already take long enough to get it up to speed with GCC and commercial compilers.  Maybe they could have paid him enough to stop working on the open source version and work on an internal fork, but it would have been terrible PR.

Before he went to Apple Chris was willing to try to convince all the authors to sign over copyrights to FSF to make it part of GCC BTW. Never happened because the GCC community misjudged things for lots of reasons, some reasonable, some not so much. NIH, LLVM performance wasn't all that at the time, too radical for too little benefit and because Stallman didn't believe in using clearly separated intermediate languages because it made using it in closed source products too easy, to name a couple.

[Nominal Animal]

Must be, but I swear under penalty of perjury and a one year sentence of using OS/2 that it's an accurate description of what I've seen.

There are worse fates...

"You seem to find it distasteful and anti-intellectual when people choose the GPL license, because you ascribe the choice to religion."

Preposterous generalization!!

It was you who said "it became something even religious".  Unless you meant your own statement was preposterous generalization, I don't see what you are objecting to.

I am talking about a user deciding wether to use a piece of software depending on its open source license and regardless of its merits. These people I am talking about (and in the late 90's it was quite frequent or I am a magnet for weirdos!) would choose Internet Information Server over NGINX if the former had a GPL license and the latter BSD or any other open source license.

At that time -- up to mid nineties -- everything BSD was overshadowed by the USL vs BSDi lawsuit.  In the late nineties, the exact status of the BSD sources was still debated, because the lawsuit was settled out of court, and the implications were unclear to those outside Novell and Berkeley University.

On the other hand, GPL had been successfully used by the GNU Project for a decade, with a very political figurehead, RMS, making it extremely clear as to what the underlying goals are, willing to speak about it to anyone who wanted to listen (or didn't get out of earshot fast enough).

A user can choose a software package based on different criteria, one of them the license.

Funny thing is, to a non-developer end user, all the free software/open source licenses provide the same freedoms -- which aside from distribution (of the original software or its derivative), boils down to "do whatever the heck you want with it".

Doubly irrational because the choice of an open source license is a bit irrelevant if you are only intending to use something.

That I can fully agree with.

I do try to explain all this to anyone I discuss licenses with, by the way.  It could be that because I myself have such a simple criteria of choosing a license, and have advised quite a few others along the same lines, I have somewhat of an echo chamber effect in my "circles".

I am not sure the license is so relevant. If I am not wrong Linux was released at an especially critical time: when BSD was hampered by legal disputes and, at the same time computers powerful enough to run a Unix like operating system comfortably were becoming mainstream.

I think the license was very relevant for exactly that same reason.  The GNU Project had very clear goals, and at that time, one could easily view them as "protecting" against Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategies (of creating incompatible closed-source derivatives, in order to exclude competitive solutions).  Although Linus Torvalds didn't think much about the license when he chose one for the Linux kernel, using the GNU tools to compile and build it made the choice easy, I understand.

Although I studied at the same University as Linus Torvalds, I didn't install Linux myself until 1996, if I recall correctly. I do recall that I did install first two Linux production servers (a mail server and a combined Netware (mars) / AppleTalk (netatalk) file server) in 1998 for a department in another University.  (I ended up maintaining a streamlined distribution based on LFS for quite a few years for those.)  I also ran a company at the same time, and had an actual lawyer go through the typical licenses, and explain their requirements and other implications to me.

[rhb]

Aside from major issue of  Novell vs UCB, Bill Joliet was making very slow progress at filling in the missing bits. I don't recall the details, but IIRC there were some personal conflicts among the BSD folks.

Linux really did not take off until IBM committed a billion dollars a year to it.  That gave Linux credibility in the corporate world and lots of applications moved off the traditional Unix workstations. Sun, HP Unix systems, SGI, DEC all died because the management was too fond of their nice margins and didn't think that Linux was a threat anymore than they saw NT as a threat. Sun eventually responded, but too little and too late.

At Usenix '95 two guys walking a few feet in front of me down Canal street were chatting and one said, "The NetBSD people look at FreeBSD as the competition.  The FreeBSD people look at Linux as the competition.  The Linux people know there is no competition."   I didn't know them as this was my first and only Usenix conference.  Should have gone more.  But I got to meet Dennis, Evi Nemeth, Tom Christianson, Eric Allman, and all the other names I knew from papers and books  I'd read.  Even got a 1.44 MB floppy with a bootable Plan 9 system :-)  I'm still amazed at  the functionality they had in 1.44 MB with space left over.

Gosling announced the availability of "Oak" but had to change the name for trademark reasons to Java.  Richard Stevens gave a great talk about union mounts and other cool filesystem  features in FreeBSD.

I've been enjoying the comments from the greybeards which is the group I targeted with the thread.  Lot's of smart folks here.

[free_electron]

oh goodie.. another kde/gnome , vi/emcs war ...

IF all the effort spent on the plethora of these loonix flavours , color schemes, convoluted text editors and gui managers was spent on writing a single, unfragmented operating system that fixes all the microsoft flaws, and could run dos/windows binaries the world would have been far better off. We'd have a unified OS that could run anything from commercial to free software , unmodified, with perfect security.

Now we have 354 different flavours of babbling baboon , pustulent penguin or Flatulent flipper (or whatever stupid name they give the next rev) to deal with. We have 20 different installers and other crap.

Why the hell do we even need installers ? software installation should be as simple as : create a folder , drop in the application package (which should be 1 physical file) and done.

The 'package' should be a virtual file system in itself containing everything the application needs. no shared files. settings , icons and executable are all contained in the package file. a descriptor file tells you what is the icon , what is the startup file. .

i can move this single file wherever i want it to reside. if i switch computer hardware : simply move the single file to the new machine and everything travels with it. Settings and all. How easy would that be ?

Programs would run in virtual containers partitioned form each other. They only see their 'package' where they can read and write, and a 'data' drive. users can grant permissions to packages to connect to data shares.
and none of that : this program requires x,y,z to be installed. if you need x,y,z it must come in the 'package'. So many times an update happens to x, y or z that breaks a program because it needs flavor 123 of package x and cannot use a different one.

I like the idea of 'portable' applications. Save em to a memory stick and done. Everything resides in 1 place.

disc space is cheap.

[rhodges]

So many times an update happens to x, y or z that breaks a program because it needs flavor 123 of package x and cannot use a different one.

So I was using KDE, version 3 I think. I wanted to install a program to sync my Palm Pilot. It started installing, and it seemed like it was taking forever! When I went to its window, I saw that it was installing the PREVIOUS version of KDE over my current one! As a dependency. ARGH!

Also, there should be a special place in hell for those who insist that they NEED the latest version of Perl for their XXX to work.

[Marco]

I like the idea of 'portable' applications. Save em to a memory stick and done. Everything resides in 1 place.

There's a wikipedia page for the concept, it's not a very popular concept though ... at least not as far as rolling the user data in with the application. Containerization of just the applications is becoming standard though, with Microsoft UWP and Ubuntu Snaps.

[bd139]

oh goodie.. another kde/gnome , vi/emcs war ...

IF all the effort spent on the plethora of these loonix flavours , color schemes, convoluted text editors and gui managers was spent on writing a single, unfragmented operating system that fixes all the microsoft flaws, and could run dos/windows binaries the world would have been far better off. We'd have a unified OS that could run anything from commercial to free software , unmodified, with perfect security.

Now we have 354 different flavours of babbling baboon , pustulent penguin or Flatulent flipper (or whatever stupid name they give the next rev) to deal with. We have 20 different installers and other crap.

Why the hell do we even need installers ? software installation should be as simple as : create a folder , drop in the application package (which should be 1 physical file) and done.

The 'package' should be a virtual file system in itself containing everything the application needs. no shared files. settings , icons and executable are all contained in the package file. a descriptor file tells you what is the icon , what is the startup file. .

i can move this single file wherever i want it to reside. if i switch computer hardware : simply move the single file to the new machine and everything travels with it. Settings and all. How easy would that be ?

Programs would run in virtual containers partitioned form each other. They only see their 'package' where they can read and write, and a 'data' drive. users can grant permissions to packages to connect to data shares.
and none of that : this program requires x,y,z to be installed. if you need x,y,z it must come in the 'package'. So many times an update happens to x, y or z that breaks a program because it needs flavor 123 of package x and cannot use a different one.

I like the idea of 'portable' applications. Save em to a memory stick and done. Everything resides in 1 place.

disc space is cheap.

Sounds like you want MacOS X! Install? Drag to Applications!

(Which is basically Mach + FreeBSD + Nextstep) 

[tooki]

The macOS concept of "packages" (aka bundles; inherited from NeXTstep) is, IMHO, one of the platform's best design decisions. For those who don't know, packages are nothing more than glorified folders — a flag tells the OS to display a package as a monolithic file on the desktop, in dialog boxes, etc., but it's actually a folder with a defined internal structure. Metadata files within provide the OS with an icon, file associations, etc.

The itch that they scratch is to allow developers to have the directory structures they need, while keeping users' grubby fingers out, as well as treating them as single files from a user standpoint (like file copies). So for example, an iPhoto library is a package, and within it is the folder structure holding the user's original photos, edited copies, thumbnails, albums, etc. But to the user it appears as a single file, preventing users from going in and moving things around, deleting things they think are unnecessary, etc. And yet, if you're a power user, you can open a package and dig into its contents.

The Mac uses packages extensively, including applications, system extensions, plug-ins of all kinds, documents, etc.


Years ago I worked for a software company that makes a Windows application (a reference management program, like EndNote). It's fundamentally a database, so there's the core SQL database file, but then also an accompanying folder structure for attachments, cover art, etc. And you wouldn't believe the trouble this caused, with users moving one without the other (even with the program creating parent folders), resulting in broken links. The Mac's packages would have 100% solved this problem. (<rant>…and using Windows' own shortcut APIs, instead of dumb text paths, would have helped a lot, too, if only the devs had bothered to do this… ::grumble:: </rant>).

[malagas_on_fire]

Yes. Kernel modules are really easy to compile and install (and write!). Literally a 4 line cut and paste makefile.

I repeat what I've said earlier probably incoherently that the Linux kernel is a nice bit of tech. Unfortunately it's a figurehead on a ship of fools on an ocean of diarrhea. It's the userland that sucks.

Well not every program requires compilation... Take for example qucs ( quite universal circuit simulator.) for Debian, needs to be compile.. or use the qucs-s which has repositores, uses SPICE instead of the native simulator. Well turns out it works well as long you use properly...  with documentation

Tutorial / Documentation:
https://qucs-help.readthedocs.io/en/spice4qucs/BasSim.html#supported-simulators

Qucs-s :

https://ra3xdh.github.io

So far the resistive divider has survided in the simulator

[Edit]
Changed repeated picture... sorry

[free_electron]

I like the idea of 'portable' applications. Save em to a memory stick and done. Everything resides in 1 place.

There's a wikipedia page for the concept, it's not a very popular concept though ... at least not as far as rolling the user data in with the application. Containerization of just the applications is becoming standard though, with Microsoft UWP and Ubuntu Snaps.

Nope user data resides elsewhere.

here is my concept. A harddisk has 3 folders
- OS
- USER
- APP

When you install an application a single file is saved to the APP folder. Everything an APP needs is contained in that file. ( think of it as a ZIP file : it contains an internal file system with all the subfiles it requires. )
In USER there is also an APP folder . That contains the <application>.SETTINGS file. The APP can only write to its own SETTINGS file (the OS governs that. no stepping out of bounds. APPS can only write to their own .SETTINGS file. The APP package contains a DEFAULT.SETTINGS. when a user lauches the application for the first time that one is saved to the users space ( again the OS does that, not under control of applications)

so
- USERS\ME\APP\excel.settings
- USERS\MYWIFE\APP\excel.settings
- APP\EXCEL.APP  <- this contains everything required to run excel , including a default.settings file.

The OS and APP folders are READ only for applications. Applications can only read their own .APP file. No peeking in other files or in the OS folder.
Applications must reqister a file extention during install. They can only WRITE to their registered file extensions. they can read any other data file in \users , so they can always import data from other applications, but they can only muck up their OWN data files.

If i need to move to different hardware  : i take the APP file and fling it on the other machine. when i first launch it the OS will create a new .SETTINGS file  , if i copied over the .SETTINGS file  it will use that one.

The OS contains functions to safely move .APP and .SETTINGS file on and off a machine.

How neat would that be. No more viruses , no more runaway programs that overwrite their own , or other programs files. No more data snooping ,They simply can't programs only see their own files contained in their .APP file and that file is read only. They can only write to their own .SETTINGS files and write to approved file extensions.

[free_electron]

oh goodie.. another kde/gnome , vi/emcs war ...

IF all the effort spent on the plethora of these loonix flavours , color schemes, convoluted text editors and gui managers was spent on writing a single, unfragmented operating system that fixes all the microsoft flaws, and could run dos/windows binaries the world would have been far better off. We'd have a unified OS that could run anything from commercial to free software , unmodified, with perfect security.

Now we have 354 different flavours of babbling baboon , pustulent penguin or Flatulent flipper (or whatever stupid name they give the next rev) to deal with. We have 20 different installers and other crap.

Why the hell do we even need installers ? software installation should be as simple as : create a folder , drop in the application package (which should be 1 physical file) and done.

The 'package' should be a virtual file system in itself containing everything the application needs. no shared files. settings , icons and executable are all contained in the package file. a descriptor file tells you what is the icon , what is the startup file. .

i can move this single file wherever i want it to reside. if i switch computer hardware : simply move the single file to the new machine and everything travels with it. Settings and all. How easy would that be ?

Programs would run in virtual containers partitioned form each other. They only see their 'package' where they can read and write, and a 'data' drive. users can grant permissions to packages to connect to data shares.
and none of that : this program requires x,y,z to be installed. if you need x,y,z it must come in the 'package'. So many times an update happens to x, y or z that breaks a program because it needs flavor 123 of package x and cannot use a different one.

I like the idea of 'portable' applications. Save em to a memory stick and done. Everything resides in 1 place.

disc space is cheap.

Sounds like you want MacOS X! Install? Drag to Applications!

(Which is basically Mach + FreeBSD + Nextstep) 

Nope. not at all. Read my previous post just above this one. I can't move a program off of a mac ... ( you could in the old mac OS... ) it needs to be 1 application is 1 file + 1 settings file. so stuff is transportable.

Hardware is expendable. Software costs lots of money . moving software is as simple as moving 2 files.

[tooki]

Well, you can move apps onto a disk on a Mac, fundamentally. Some applications don’t like this at all, but most are just fine with it. However, they do normally look for preferences, etc in the user’s home directory, not on the external disk.

There’s literally no difference in this regard between Mac OS X and classic Mac OS: both have a Preferences folder, and in both, an application on an external disk still looks for the preferences file in the Preferences folder. (It’s been a long, LONG time since Mac applications kept their preference files in the same folder as the application file!!!) Same with dynamic libraries and other assets in the Application Support folders. (Many assets will also work if simply located in the same folder as the application file. This is a way of e.g. providing a library without having to put it in the System folder.)

Some applications are smart, and will launch with the preferences file in an arbitrary location by dragging the preferences file onto the application icon.

[free_electron]

Well, you can move apps onto a disk on a Mac, fundamentally. Some applications don’t like this at all, but most are just fine with it. However, they do normally look for preferences, etc in the user’s home directory, not on the external disk.

There’s literally no difference in this regard between Mac OS X and classic Mac OS: both have a Preferences folder, and in both, an application on an external disk still looks for the preferences file in the Preferences folder. (It’s been a long, LONG time since Mac applications kept their preference files in the same folder as the application file!!!) Same with dynamic libraries and other assets in the Application Support folders. (Many assets will also work if simply located in the same folder as the application file. This is a way of e.g. providing a library without having to put it in the System folder.)

Some applications are smart, and will launch with the preferences file in an arbitrary location by dragging the preferences file onto the application icon.

but you can't move them OFF ...
My idea is to be able to easily move software and settings to a new platform. if i upgrade my computer : move the files and done.
Better yet : install these files on a networked drive. that way my hardware is irrelevant. No matter from where i work : the software is accessible.

[borjam]

but you can't move them OFF ...
My idea is to be able to easily move software and settings to a new platform. if i upgrade my computer : move the files and done.
Better yet : install these files on a networked drive. that way my hardware is irrelevant. No matter from where i work : the software is accessible.

That is largely a non problem with Mac OS X as long as application developers respect some pretty basic guidelines. If preferences, caches, program data, etc are in predictable locations it's quite easy to migrate everything to a new computer. I have done it several times almost without hiccups (except having to re enter license data
for some programs).

[bd139]

Time machine. Killed your Mac? Plug new one into drive, make some coffee. Old Mac back on new hardware.

I know someone who has done this successfully through 5 new macs.

[Nominal Animal]

Many assets will also work if simply located in the same folder as the application file. This is a way of e.g. providing a library without having to put it in the System folder.

There is nothing stopping one from writing and compiling ones applications to behave that way even now.  All you need is a small launcher (wrapper script), that tells the dynamic linker about it.

I blame the users.  They are completely satisfied working with crappy tools that crash or occasionally corrupt their data.

Whenever I've built services or applications that I could trust, I've had to listen to an endless stream of "It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to look good" from cow-orkers, managers, and clients alike.  Silly bugger...


In late nineties, I maintained a couple of classrooms full of MacOS 7.5 machines, with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and PageMaker, Macromedia Freehand, Microsoft Word, and so on.  As soon as I got the department to switch to bulk licensing, I switched the maintenance from individual machines to cloning, with the master on a CD-R.  Didn't even need any cloning software, because of the folder-based approach MacOS used: just boot from the CD-R, clear the hard drive, copy the files and folders to the hard drive, and reboot (pressing a key to rebuild the desktop database).

Saved a crapton of time, and reduced downtimes to just minutes (in case of a machine getting b0rked during a lesson).  Pity the department head (who refused to use a computer themselves, having a personal secretary print and type their emails for them) didn't trust me enough to give me a budget for consumables: every laser printer ink cassette, keyboard, and mouse that could not be refurbished, I had to obtain permission to buy a replacement, separately, in writing. My interactions with administrative types only went downhill from there, and is the reason why I burned out before I turned thirty.

[tooki]

but you can't move them OFF ...
My idea is to be able to easily move software and settings to a new platform. if i upgrade my computer : move the files and done.

Huh? Where'd you get that idea? I don't say this to be rude or condescending in any way, but I think you're basing all your comments on very incomplete knowledge of what's possible!

You absolutely can do that. The easiest way is by using the Migration Assistant in the macOS setup, which clones over EVERYTHING from your old Mac or a Time Machine backup (or actually any disk containing the folder structure of a macOS boot disk). You can do it manually and it'll work — Migration Assistant isn't doing any weird under-the-hood magic — but there's no compelling reason to do so, since Migration Assistant does it so well.

You can also clone a disk and use it on a new machine, provided the OS version is new enough. My Mac Pro (Intel Xeon) desktop is running an installation of Mac OS X 10.11.x which has been directly cloned and upgraded (no migration assistant!) through every version of Mac OS X back to 10.2.7 (!) originally running on a PowerBook G4 (PowerPC). So literally not only moving from one machine to another, but from one CPU architecture to another, through many disks as I upgraded storage over the years, and upgrading the OS. (Mac OS X 10.5 was compatible with both PPC and Intel, so it provided the version of Mac OS X that could simply be cloned from the PowerBook to the Mac Pro with zero reinstallation of anything.)

And again, most applications can be copied to an external disk and run just fine, as I said.

Better yet : install these files on a networked drive. that way my hardware is irrelevant. No matter from where i work : the software is accessible.

This is also doable, if the application is well-behaved. Most apps simply do not care where they are located. It's not uncommon in companies, for example, to have apps on a file server, even without network user accounts (the app simply uses the user's local preferences folder). And of course you can do full managed networks with roaming profiles and everything.

Now, depending on the speed of the LAN, running apps from a file server can incur a severe performance penalty, since nearly all Macs now use high-speed SSD storage that exceeds nearly all LANs' performance significantly. (Recent Macs have SSDs with sustained read speeds of around 3GB/sec, many times faster than even 10Gbit ethernet.)

And of course, nowadays you can use cloud storage like iCloud or Dropbox for data. (I haven't tried running an app from iCloud or its predecessor, iDisk, for a long time… it did work, but was excruciatingly slow.) But if you purchased an app from the Mac app store, then you can just log into the app store and install the app on any machine you use.