Your concern about standardizing Linux and Open Source Software as whole is
very touching and indeed if we can achieve this, it's going to help a lot of
the users like me and you.
But as you have quoted yourself that standardization is very
difficult in this arena because you have a lot of OSS and distros and
standardizing take a lot of time, but isn't impossible. Even though there
are a lot of standardizations like ODF <http://www.odfalliance.org/> (Open
Document Format). Meanwhile different organizations like Open Source
Development Lab (OSDL <http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Main_Page>) are
practising Open Standards (see
http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard for details) at present and the
debate for it is getting postive grounds.
Focussing on your issue of creating a
Human-Computer-Interface guideline, I think an absoulte guideline may not be
feasible in the domain of OSS. Different companies like Microsoft, Apple etc
have their own design guidelines, and such guidelines are specific to the
company interests and the designers involved. I never meant to say that it
can't be implied in Open Source Projects. Different Linux Distros and OSS
companies have their own ad-hoc guidelines, and the interface selection is
majorly performed through the voting process. As for example, Fedora Project
has it's own Artwork
Team<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork?action=show&redirect=ArtWork>to
handle such type of issues. There are a lot of similarities in the
design
guidelines adopted by different OSS, but it's very difficult to impose a
single absolute design guideline due to its openness and a long debate that
may occur on it.
Moreover what is happening these
days is the seggregation of design principles because of many OSS acquiring
a huge user base and thus their design guidelines being a de-facto.
Similarly, due to a huge competition between different OSS, there is always
a pressure to refine their guidelines to make it better, and that's the
reason why Linux is becoming more user friendly day by day.
What so ever, I didn't mean to point that
you were wrong or the idea of having such a design guideline is not good. I
just wanted to put my views on it.
On Dec 2, 2007 8:04 PM, Ujwal (RUBBOT) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> It's a good part for us that we've been trusting many opensource
> softwares for years and over. I hope we won't loose our trust for
> another hundreds of years. However, sometime something happens which
> let us think about trusting open-source deeply. last time when i got a
> chance to look at Mac Os x human interface guide suddenly something
> touched in me about Open-Source. What Mac developers thinks is, user
> should never confuse on what they were using. It might be pressing a
> button to showing a dialog box or even while configuring internet or
> devices. The thing Mac is trying to convince their developers that
> standardization is the most what lots of users want. We in the world
> of linux got many softwares for Different types for different
> purposes. We got many Desktop environments. Each and every one dealing
> their users in their way. Now the point is a user never uses desktop
> environment all the time he got. The thing is the software they got.
> How about standardzing applications on linux, how about getting human
> interface guidelines in Linux too (I know OLPC got one). what about
> feeling no problem in configuring internet either in (suse, debian,
> fedora etc). The same way in Everything. I know it's even harder to
> standardize Linux, because of more than 1000 of different Distros.....
> We can't say your are standard and you are the best. Might be we'll
> get such more problem in linux, we'll are sure to solve each one.
> presently I got another problem.... I thought Debian is one of my
> Choice.. better in every aspect. Last time i couldn't be able to
> compile my kernel in my way i used as in previous time. Later i got
> "make-kpkg". I found my new kernel ready to go. Sooner during booting
> i got problem no login ... just restarts x-server i couldn't be able
> to get console login, found that kernel is trying to get keystrokes
> and then print on console instead of giving me FULL access. Anyway not
> rocket science problem. I used old kernel. everthing was back. later I
> copied all my datas from Desktop to a 2 GiB pendrive . deleted
> everything from my Desktop. after burning a disc. i backed everything
> from pendrive to my Desktop. once again something is not good to me.
> Each and every file is 0 byte. The most amazing thing is the filename
> and properties is same beside nothing. I was not upset, even though
> i'd loosed everything in pendrive too. there are some of my important
> documents and i can't recover again. I thought it's my own fault. My
> fault is I believed in something. I still want to believe it more. Now
> i'm downloading ubuntu gusty (derived from debian). If the same cases
> is for you and your using Debian then what would you wanna Do?
> Believe me or Open-source. Still open-source softwares are best and
> good.. still there is something we don't like. can we start to make
> softwares(/linux) a standard as like W3C.. ? might be we can if we
> tried.
> regards
> Ujwal ( as i found debian 4.0 rc0 and debian 4.0 rc1 are not stable
> as it is written. Found 100% crashing in every computer i installed).
> >
>
--
_______________________________________
Abhishek Singh
Fedora 8 has released!!
http://fedoraproject.org
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