Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 16:42:26 +0000 From: Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk> To: "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net> Cc: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011101164226.B47017@jake.akitanet.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <00d101c162ee$f53ae260$6600000a@columbia>; from achornback@worldnet.att.net on Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 11:04:59AM -0500 References: <20011101095903.B43740@jake.akitanet.co.uk> <00d101c162ee$f53ae260$6600000a@columbia>
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On Nov 1, "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net> wrote: > [tirade snipped for brevity] Thanks. :-) > Paul, I've got one simple question for you. You develop on and for Unix > platforms, as it says above. Unix platforms have a generally accepted set > of standards that those playing the game play by. Indeed, however some standards, we all must accept for better or for worse, are generic and don't come from a range of individuals from across the industry sat around a table (or mailing list) hammering out the technical merits of each point. One organisation or group or even individual just comes up with it from nowhere. Unavoidable, but should be noted. > Now, when it comes to Java, Javascript and all of that hooey (It's a > Southern term), who's version do you use? Who produces REAL Java? Sun, the > originators of the standard... or Microsoft, the ones that took the standard > and perverted it for their own political uses? That is really a client issue - if the client says that the site will be accessed from MS platforms, and for whatever reason they want to make sure that everything is as compatible as possible out of the box, you have to look to using MS technology. In the case of websites, anybody with a copy of analog looking after a busy mainstream site can see that MS IE is the predominant browser, and as such is the benchmark 'standard' browser you put the most effort into developing the site for. > You raise some interesting issues, but I think that it's quite comical for > sites to require MSIE for doing Java work, etc. when Microsoft isn't even > producing a Java development package anymore. For those that don't know, > Microsoft had to sell J++ and the related items to Rational Software in > order to satisfy the judge's ruling in their lawsuit against Sun. Java is indeed a bad example now. I think my argument went off on a tangent because I can't understand why people don't see what I see. It's great producing W3-standard compliant browsers, and making sure that all your software adopts open standards. Given a free reign, I would want to ensure that this sort of technology was on every desktop in the world. However, right now, it isn't. And faced with that fact the OSS community has two choices: 1. We can whine about MS till the cows come home. We can tell every PHB and user in the land that MS sucks. We can try and convince them to move to an alternative technology, because that technology is what we believe in. We can point out that if you change the way things work both technically and to some extent politically (MS Word Docs should not be the inter-office standard for example), then the world becomes a better place. It might not save them money straight away, and early adopters are running a risk that we're are all talking crap. But that's the way it is. OR 2. We look at our codebase, and the functionality. We decide the best way to move forward is to give the user the same experience on our platforms as on the MS platforms. We work, as a community, to make sure that sites that are 'latest IE only' also look great and work in an identical manner when they are viewed in Mozilla or Konqueror. We then go back to the users and PHBs and say 'look, it's all effectively identical, plus TCO is lower, licensing is more liberal, and it's all infinitely extendible due to the fact we have the source' Question: Which approach is going to get the most users? Which approach is going to convince the PHB and the users that open technology is the way to go? The long term goal should be about technical excellence, and everything that is done now should be done to the best standard we can adopt, however we also need users and PHBs to not be intimidated when they come to evaluate our 'product'. Take an example of a new user who wants to do a bit of typing up on their machine, print some documents out, and perhaps send a few e-mails. Given a PC a slight clue and an hour, and they're most likely to going to start getting the hang of the basics. At the moment, with FreeBSD we hand them a copy of the Handbook and ask 'So, first off - what do you know about disklabel?' - User Experience is all, and the OSS community has to begin to accept that to gain mass acceptance. Without mass acceptance, nobody listens to the politcal or legal cries we make. In the end, to compete with MS, you have to start by mimicking them to a certain extent. I don't think I'm saying anything new here, but at least my argument is clearer now than it may have been before. > Nothing I can say or do is going to change how you go about your business. > But, I'll say this much, when you start producing websites that REQUIRE that > God-awful Microsoft Passport thing, expect much more of an uproar. Passport is a politcal issue more than a technical issue. If we wanted, we could all sit down now and work out an open, secure, distributed, peer-to-peer style Passport 'mimic'. However, how many mainstream sites would adopt it? At the moment, virtually none. What if we put support into Mozilla? OK, people are starting to get slightly interested, but even with Netscape's blessing it's not going to go far. What if we say 'look, this is almost identical to IE in every way, except it's better, because...' and we then go out on a mass 'marketing drive'. At that point, we start making inroads. We at least get to the point where companies will look to support both systems. And that's when we can advance by being more innovative than the competitor. It all comes back to User Experience, and if the User is happy with IE, it's going to take a lot to convince them to change. Even the VBS worms didn't make a sizeable dent in the number of users using Outlook for mail. Right, enough rambling. I hope my argument is a little clearer now than it was this morning (local time for me). Should turn into an interesting argument, this. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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