> "ordinary" users of any thing called Foo tend to first go to "foo.com"
Ha! I guess I'm not ordinary: given a choice between foo.com and foo.org, I'll always take the latter. One might think that would make me a Linux enthusiast, but I think there's something to be said for a formal organization directing the development of an engineering project. Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar is one distinction, but another distinction when it comes to developing technology is: what is the fundamental goal? Good design or making money? In other words, do engineering values or profit-seeking predominate in a company? To take the auto industry as an example, one can say that Detroit tried to make money, with actually designing and building automobiles being a nuisance that only lowly engineers and workers were concerned with, whereas the aim of companies like Honda is to design and build good cars, with profitability being seen as the likely outcome of such activity. One can say that Sun was the Honda of the computing industry, while Microsoft is its General Motors. Recent experience seems to show that focusing on good engineering is a less risky strategy in the auto industry than in the computing industry. A first guess at an explanation for this would be that "ordinary" users understand cars better than they understand computing. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
