Todd Walton([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 05:51:23PM -0500 wrote: > On 7/28/07, Tracy R Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Very well put. Learning something new is hard for most people. > > I see it every day at work. Most of my coworkers who are more > > familiar with Windows are happy to let a big project depend on > > Windows. I have to step in with my input to convince them > > otherwise and sometimes it is quite difficult. People go with > > what they are already familiar with and fight to do so. > > I'm working help desk in a large company, and it's an all > Microsoft shop. And I mean, if there's a Microsoft product that > does what we want, that's what we get. > > The way it seems to happen is that someone decides we need to > implement some process or handle some thing better or gain some > functionality. So the assumption is always: 1) Get some piece of > software, so 2) what are we going to buy? > > I'd like to see the process go more like: 1) What are we trying > to accomplish? 2) What do we need people to do to accomplish > that? 3) What mix of software and process will accomplish that? > i.e., there doesn't have to be The One Product that will do the > job. >
And of course, you're only describing the corporate version of the struggle. But I'm still left wondering why I should care. It's not that I don't see a benefit to the widespread use of OSS, but more that the benefits are squandered because desktop app development is starting to follow the old patterns that I wanted to get away from. My concerns aren't only about the closed source and file formats that I mentioned in the earlier post. I think that the assumptions about what makes a desktop application good have become very diluted. This is a lot harder to fix than just getting an employer to adopt OSS. After that first post, I picked up the latest Linux Magazine (August '07). In the "Letters" column Jason Perlow, Sr. Technology Editor, responded to a letter. He said that "if Linux is to achieve critical mass on the desktop, we're going to have to make some hard and painful choices, such as eventually focusing development efforts on one desktop methodology over another, or merging the two systems." This is exactly the thing I was trying to address. The fact that there is such heated debate over which desktop is better seems like all the evidence required to prove that a *single* desktop environment isn't sufficient. But, putting all that aside, why do *we* Linux users have to make "hard and painful choices"? When will we have "critical mass", and why do we want it? I made a hard and painful decision years ago to adopt a less popular OS and apps that would make it more difficult to share files. I was moderately ridiculed by one family member who for months took every chance to ride me for using "loonix". Now, Jason Perlow is encouraging the readers to ditch what made Linux attractive... the options... the choices..., so that others, who by definition haven't appreciated that about Linux, will start using Linux. I'm sure Miguel deIcaza and Jason Perlow aren't conspiring to ruin Linux or OSS, but this kind of thinking seems to be growing in popularity. I'm not going to make *another* painful choice to reverse the painful choice I already made, just so that new users can avoid a painful choice. Hey. I have an idea! Let's make sure there is only one desktop Linux application for each category of application! Let's make sure that they can run in a .NET environment! Let's help viruses propagate without putting those poor developers through the effort of even finding new ways to write them! We don't want the new users to even be able to tell that they aren't using the same desktop as always, and we can do it!!! Yea!!! Bleh. I'm starting to get irritable. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
