Dean Michael C. Berris wrote: > Well, if I want my work to be used in the wider world, I think I should > make it 1) work 2) work well 3) work better as the need arises and 4) > hope that others find use in it as I do. > > Now regarding the standards on ease of use, and must be easy to support > by the point-and-drool crowd, who sets THAT standard? What if my > intended audience for the application was for people who needed to do a > certain task in administration? How about bash, do you need a neat GUI > for bash? >
That depends on who your target users are. If your target is people like you and me, well, there's not much of a problem there. We're experts in this sort of thing you know. We actually *like* learning new things about computers and tinkering with them, so we can put up with a lot of stuff that the average person would find bewildering. Frankly, I find the expression "point-and-drool crowd" more than mildly offensive. That kind of condescension and arrogance is the main problem our software faces in its acceptance by the mainstream. These people are in general not idiots. The only difference they generally have from you and me, Mr. Berris, is that they aren't interested in the software as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. They want the software to simply work, and then get on with whatever it is they needed to do with its help, and not worry about the details. Most solutions cobbled together from random Free Software don't have this degree of invisibility, and that puts off most people who would use it, unless it came really cheap and has *dependable* support. It's this last requirement that causes the most trouble. > Then it depends on how you duct-tape your solutions then. I've > duct-taped Beowulf clusters before, and I think THEY scale. ;) > The scalability Orly's talking about is not the scalability of the solution, but the scalability of the support that goes along with the solution, namely you. I've been doing the kind of duct-tape solutions that Orly so derides for most of my professional life, and what I can tell you is that it's boring, tedious, and thankless work. Get it to work, they ignore you, because it should be working anyway. If there's a problem with it, they scream at you. Having a corporation behind you on this only marginally eases it. After having to fix so many minor issues for the umpteenth time you get sick of it. The only advantage I get doing this for a company is that I can usually farm off part of the support work to more junior engineers who need to learn the ropes so to speak. -- General purpose money is what allows people to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola. http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/ _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
