And you should absolutely do something about this. Unless GPL infringement is met with at least the threat of legal action, it will continue unchecked.

...the Software Freedom Law Center

They exist specifically for evaluating and defending against this sort of infringement. They're experts, and their services are generally free.

You know, way back when /. was awesome, this wouldn't have even been a debate. God damn, I miss the late '90's.

I sincerely hope this isn't being listed as a plus for using Cake. If "language/framework/methodology n forces me to write better code!" is ever heard as a complaint, the source of said complaint is in the wrong field.

That being said, Ruby and/or Rails doesn't force anyone to write better code. I have seen some crawling horrors perpetrated in Ruby that have kept me up nights. They do facilitate the writing of better code quite nicely. Whereas PHP doesn't do anybody any favors. Ever. PHP WTFs are generally of the "never sleep again" variety. The Cthulhu of WTFs.

If you have Ruby people on your team, use Rails (or Sinatra/Padrino if you need less magic). I say this only because the Rubyists are going to spend more time flogging any other language into behaving more like Ruby than on actual domain problems.

On the other hand, if you choose a PHP or Python-based framework, one of them might come up with a really handy gem that lets you generate PHP or Python code from Ruby, and you could blog about it.

Not even trying to start a flame war, I'm a Rubyist, I work with Rubyists, and this post is intended as Ha Ha Only Serious based on my experience.

Have you ever used zenmap (formerly nmapfe)? This is how a LOT of *nix GUIs work. They wrap a command-line utility, use the GUI to compose the argv, execute, and pipe the output to a buffer in the GUI itself, with the option to export that buffer to a file.

It's simple, brilliant, and elegant.

Sure, but certainly not more powerful than exporting to CSV and doing your calculations in Perl or Ruby.

GUI tools are great for people who never learned to use the CLI. But once you know how to use it, there's no need to submit to the bondage and discipline of a GUI.

At the duty-free shop on your way out of the country. Unfortunately, it's not available to U.S. citizens.

Don't worry, the GOP is completely fine with murder-neutrality laws. But net neutrality, that's a crime against Jeebus and Adam Smith!

Obvious troll is obvious

Really? My first Linux install was Slack, and I constantly find myself missing the lesstif widgets + the *wm with the default Motif behaviour re focus etc.

The perfect UI for 90% of all use cases has existed for decades. I think In The Beginning Was The Command Line should be required reading for all of those "Intro to Computer Literacy" classes they tend to require of college freshmen (or did about 6 years ago when I was still taking classes). I can see GUIs for Photoshop or Final Cut or whatever, but the vast majority of my computer usage is spent in bash/zsh and vim. And I'm not even describing my coding/sysadmin work, this is home use. As far as GUIs go, I liked Enlightenment, and I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. Lion is shite, Windows has always been shite, and Unity pisses me off. GNOME 3 is probably the least shite of the new ones, but that's not saying much.

The only updates Red Hat is ever prompt with are security updates. Until recently, I was forced to use RHEL for a number of servers (yes, it could have been much worse, Windows, etc.) but I spent a good deal of time rebuilding RPMs from Fedora just to get current libraries. And I'm not talking weird drivers for esoteric hardware, I'm referring to core language support for Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.

One option you could look at is using Ubuntu. The product is free but Canonical offers paid support for the LTS releases. So you could deploy on it now, and if attitudes change, you can add support later. I've never purchased support for an existing install, there may be a consultancy fee for them to make sure you're not trying to buy support after the fact for a system that's already borked... but it's an option worth exploring.

Also... just because in twelve years of using /., I've never done this... FIRST!!

you're using it wrong.