-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 09:03:20PM -0400, Doug wrote: > > > On 10/28/2015 12:39 AM, David Christensen wrote: > >On 10/27/2015 06:10 PM, David Christensen wrote: > >>You are free to study the source code and help the OP solve his problem. > > > >Sorry -- that sounds harsh. > > > > > >I say "study the source code" [...]
> I am not a programmer [...] Who is? I write programms and still the innards of GCC are very difficult for me to get at. > What percentage of Debian users does anyone reading this believe to > be able to read the source code (if they even know where to look to > find it) and then to modify it to suit their needs? > > Surely Linux was a programmer's wonderland when it came out in 1995, > but it is now a system which even grandmothers are using. I would not > ever suggest that it become closed source--as I suspect one or two > distros may be on the way to--but it should be realized that its > original wonderfulness is lost on the majority of modern-day users. In one thing I agree: Free Software in itself is useless. You need the users who know and appreciate the advantages. In one thing I disagree most decidedly: being fatalist about the "dumb users". We have to keep up easing access to others, so that Free actually works, because it presupposes users who can, in a pinch, help themselves. Let's go teach grandma (why not grandpa as well?) functional programming! [1] - - - - - - - - - [1] Yeah, oversimplified and that: but still: Free is useless if it is inaccessible. There are many aspects to accessibility: good docs, well-written programs and the saturday afternoon thing in which we exchange cookies for "teach me how to write a bug report" (yes, this saturday I'll have some cookies, looking forward). regards - -- tomás -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlYwfEQACgkQBcgs9XrR2kZ9zACfc9EVxFGYfXmR0MFxiNpm15+V KSEAnRmv0io+FV7b2peN4C/1Z3r7MdWJ =6Tps -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
