All these complaints about how things are won't fix a thing!
If the LINUX community were interested in providing a service, that is, a
service for anyone other than themselves, they'd have done the up-to-now
missing 90% of the work and cleaned up and documented their software.
Instead, you have a terrible mess of code with comments that hve been
irrelevant and incorrect for the last 25 revisions, yet nobody's been
willing to delete them. Generally, design and coding is about 2% of the
job, debugging is another 3%, cleanup is about 5% and thorough and accurate
documentation is about 90.
From what I've seen so far, the LINUX community,
though well-intentioned,
has done little to provide tools useable by the masses.
Instead of lighting that "one candle" they'd rather personalize their
frustration, resulting, BTW, from their own lack of application effort,
targeting Bill Gates, whose policies are really no different from those of
any corporate leader. They're supposed to outdo the competition, trip them
up, confound their efforts to acquire market share, and just generally try
to do them in. Gates and Co have done well. What's more, for every LINUX
user who's even remotely satisfied with what he has, there are thousands of
Windows-users out there who love their OS. One difference, however, is that
they (the Windows users) don't have to spend their lives stroking the OS
just to keep it alive.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Tinker" <jtinker(a)coin.org>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2001 7:25 AM
Subject: Re: Nuke Richmond
"W.B.(Wim) Hofman" wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Can you expect to say to a housewife : This is a Linux cd. Install it on
> this computer and I expect you to have looked at these Internet sites by
> tomorrow morning? It would have to be some housewife!! Linux needs far
to
much work
still to make it fit for the masses.
Wim
Don't forget the opportunity lost due to M$ predations. Gates didn't
invent
software. He pulled the rug out from under a lot of
good effort, using
everyone else's work, but trying to protect his own. He poked his finger
in
the eye of standards wherever possible. Standard
layers will be the
foundation
of future system elaboration. The fundamental
contradiction Gates had to
get
around, was that between "information age"
and "proprietory software". It
is
the "rising tide lifts all boats" problem.
What is the value of wealth,
unless
you are richer than the next guy? If everybody is
rich, who will pick up
the
garbage? When people started passing around copies of
his BASIC, Gates
realized the problem, and the solution.
-- John Tinker