Quoting Muli Ben-Yehuda, from the post of Tue, 04 Mar: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 04:14:07PM +0200, Eli Billauer wrote: > > > Because if you open KWord, you can't take it as anything else but a > > clone of MS-Word. It looks the same, it feels the same, and it has a > > So... don't open KWord! I don't use any Linux app which imitates the > (broken, IMHO) MS GUI interfaces. Neither KWord, nor evolution, nor > openoffice, nor name-your-favorite-MS-application-Linux-clone.
I asked RMS what he had to say to all the critics that blame the Free Software movement of unoriginality, ripping off of ideas and GUIs. his answer can be summed up thus "We have not come to redesign the world, just free it. the only way to do it is change the existing pieces of the puzzle (luckily Unix was always modular), while keeping the PAIs, until the last block is converted and you have a fully free system." I think keeping the GUI is sort of "keeping the user-computer API", the I is for interface in both GUI and API afterall. once you finish a product you can use as a drop-in replacement for the one it immitates, you commoditise the market and start a real competition by differentiation. Excell could not start grabbing market before Excell was similar enough to Lotus 1-2-3 and MSWord surpassing Multiscribe and Macintosh Appleworks. the later throtteling of giants like WordPerfect was only possible once they reached a much higher percentage of the market. (To this day I miss Lotus AmםPro which became IBM WordPro and now may have been discontinued completely, same for Lotus Approach. They were supperior to MS' counterparts, but they weretoo small to innovate I guess.) So problem 1: you have to immitate so people start to migrate, only then you can innovate. Problem 2: good GUI requires a lot of understanding and research. Apple has such people. Microsoft has a few as well, but the good ones are rare and possibly expensive, none of them do Free Software other than in rare cases like Eazel, and we all know where they ended up :( http://eazel.com/ -- Former mouseketeer Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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