On Sun, 30 Jun 2002, Dennis Eberl wrote: > twisting and FUD (both tue). Obviously Microsoft responds to a need > purchasers have. If the Linux community could define and address that need > (which for reasons not worth belaboring it cannot, for it is built on the > wrong "economic model"), it would be in a position to offer real > competition to Microsoft. IMHO, it never will. > And that need is for a prepackaged "user experience" that "just works".
You are correct in pointing out that the open source model won't work very well in any attempt to optimize for a seamless UI where everything visible to the user works predictably ( the problem for most us is that what's hidden away is important to us ). Disneyland has a great User Interface, everything works the way that it's supposed to and lot's of thought has gone into making the inevitable difficulties psychologically unnoticeable. However it would be a truly sucky place to get work done, particularly creative work where there were lots of possible ways of accomplishing a given objective. > As it is, and this is certainly wonderful and from my perspective an > outstanding and no doubt long lived step forward, BSD, Linux et alia will > remain the favorites of programmers and web site administrators, but will > not even ever succeed as the favorite operating system of the poor, for the > poor are for the most part people who want what those who are not poor have, > which is -- you guessed it! -- Windoze. > Which is the domain of the bourgeois, the rich use Macs, or Bloomberg workstations or high-end propietary unix workstations. <snip/> > I hope you take this as the non-maliscious observation, possibly wrong, of > someone succumbing to the temptation to play devil's advocate. It is not > meant to demean or attack Linux, BSD, open source, or any of the more > ardent members of EUG-LUG. The open source movement is an intelligent, > needed alternative to purely commercial software that has, I believe, a > _permanent_ place in the future of worldwide computing. I just don't think > it is the path to universal brotherhood, world peace, or the everlasting > Holy Grail. My take is that real democracies and actual free markets are untidy contentious affairs where problems are resolved through vicious unrelenting competition (friendly vicious unrelenting competition). Much of the criticism the free software community levels at Microsoft and the rest of the media industry is that they are attempting to make it illegal to compete. It's as if the Disney Corporation were taking over most of the media and simultaneously trying to get legislation passed that would require everyone to live by disneyland's rules (oh wait... bad example Disney is trying to do just that) > FWIW!? > > Dennis Eberl > -- http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi)
