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Wow! Impressive! Especially the multisyllable
reference! Humm... Is someone hinting that I may be an idiot? Well, that just
may be true! But, the point I'm trying to get at here is that AOL has
absoluletely bastardized everything they have put their hands on since the day
of their inception, and taken advantage of less *technically savvy* users
for just as long with their marketing glitz. Red Hat is (in my humble opinion) a
great product. I'd hate to see it destroyed by a hack fest of an operation
like AOhell. I don't particularly care about the business, or the money. Just
the product. That's all. Plain and simple.
To be honest, Robert, I'm not
sure why you assumed *I* needed a history lesson (SCOUnix? Yep...Been
there, done that...), but thank you just the same! ;-)
Have
a great night!
-Mark
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 10:34
PM
Subject: Thoughts on DL
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Let's
not talk about "selling out" (re: possible purchase by AOL
or RH), but
about entrepreneurship (Hey, Ma! -- Look! More than
three
syllables!)
Several things motivate a business: Making money
(otherwise,
just work for someone else), offer a new product, better
service
or otherwise distinguishably (and hopefully better) offering for
the customers, the excitement of the challenge and perhaps a
wish to
see one's name in lights.
If RH "sells out" (based on interviews with
the founders of RH),
I would say it is most likely because they see
themselves as the
"leading edge" of the Linux movement and will like to
see it do
well in the marketplace and on the desktop. They've done a
good
job, but they've also bought into the "rush to market with the
latest" approach to their distribution and it's already caused a
number of embarrasing releases that wouldn't quite work. As I
understand their philosopy, a well-structured sale to AOL would
actually fit the vision they had when they started.
Joe's vision,
as he states it, is to accept that MS has done a
damn good job of
packaging and has had any number of really good
ideas (many of them
originally stolen from Unix and Apple), but
has put them together in a
package thatis both buggy and
appealing in its simplicity for the average
user.
Linux, until Joe, seemed primarily designed for the geek or the
technologically proficient (same thing, actually) -- a tiny
minority
of users. More and more people have had the vision of
producing a
distribution of linux that would appeal to the
average desktop user.
What was needed was a collection of
easy-to-use productivity and
entertainment products that
performed pretty much as expected.
As
recently as three years ago, all we could find were some
mediocre word
processors, a few clumsy spreadsheet programs that
reminded me of the
kinds available in the early 1980's, tons of
klutzy editors (sorry you
emacs and vi fans -- but that's the
judgment of the vast majority of
ordinary users), a few
graphics tools, nothing really useful for
accounting and, in
general, a really nice operating system and not much
else. Unix
on a desktop -- and not much else. (Except we did
have TeX.)
Within a year, we had Star Office 5.2 -- a really good and
usable word processor and spreadsheet application that I was
already
using, Moneydance -- a modest but powerful accounting
package, and some
GUI based text editors that really worked.
Today, we have some really
good applications, Kapital (not quite
there, folks, but, within a month or
so will be) for accounting
and I have absolutely no need for Windows for
anything except my
taxes.
I'm running, not on the latest and
greatest, but on an old 200
MHz machine with only 128MB RAM and 4GB of
hard disk space.
It's as fast as any Windows programs, is rapidly
losing its
clumsiness, and, thanks to Joe, not overcrowded with
applications I will not use in a month of Sundays. Instead, I
have a lean, mean and fantastically well designed desktop
program with
the ability to add other programs that I would
want, but without having
options I don't give a damn about.
In other words, Joe has fulfilled
the early (and now abandoned)
dream of Caldera's desktop installation plus
taken some of the
beneficial lessons from MS. Rather than condemn MS
for bugs and
complexities and really difficult administration tools, he
has
praised them for their successes in getting so many people to
using computers productively and entertainingly and brought many
of
their best features to Linux.
And it keeps getting better -- month by
month. MS gets better
and gets more bugs with each
distribution. Its security stinks
(way too many holes and why they
still have Outlook Express --
perhaps for "if you use it, you had better
look out" -- I have
no idea) and its memory management leaves just a
little bit to
be desired. I mean, I hate those crashes and page
faults.
I'm excited by what Joe is doing. But I don't jump on RH
for
"selling out." That's only the way it looks if you think of any
big business as an enemy (why anyone would think that way, only
their
psychiatrist would know). In fact, it is my hope that
this new
company becomes huge and successful. If it does, it
will only stay
that way by keeping its present vision. If it
doesn't, if it becomes
buggy and clumsy, someone else will
replace it.
That's the way of
business.
- --
Robert Black Eagle
Bus. Site: http://www.desertsilver.com
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