Date: 01 Nov 2001 14:26:50 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <bysnbycel1.nby@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20011101193854.K2921-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> References: <20011101193854.K2921-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net>
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Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> writes: > Speaking neither for the FreeBSD Project, nor for the OSS movement, I'd > really like to ask if we really *want* mass acceptance? FreeBSD, even with > a "nice" KDE desktop, is not for everyone, neither should it be for > everyone! So put it into words. Who should it be for? Geniuses who think like computers and those who like to spend days configuring (and learning about) things which M$ and Apple users can configure in a few minutes or seconds (and often needn't bother to learn about at all)? Why shouldn't it be for "the rest of us", who would like to learn and do other things? Of course, the first instinct is that it should be for the people who develop and support it. But I doubt that is a good plan. More later. I think "mass acceptance" would be a worthy goal, not inconsistent with "good OS" (good community, good app devel env, good server, etc), but I recognize that FreeBSD developers have more important things to work on. But any OS does need to worry about who is going to accept the OS and consider that when making design decisions. "Mass" is going to far, but "FreeBSD developers and server administrators" is not going far enough if the OS is going to avoid a slide into oblivion, especially as good-enough-and-less-time-consuming alternatives become available. An OS has to have users to survive; I suspect that most developers do so partly to improve their use of the OS. If there were few users, only a very few developers would have the incentive to develop, even those who do it mostly for ego/enjoyment. Free OSes would have many more users AND developers, and would be a much better OS to use, if developers had devoted a lot of thought to usability and development teamwork instead of adding thousands of little-needed programs and command options. Of course, they should have the freedom to do what they want. I'm just saying that they should want to make an OS that is quick to learn and easy to use. Otherwise, if they don't develop such an OS, too many people will be jumping ship and the future will be short, as commercial OSes, after all these years, finally mature to the good-enough performance level, while retaining and improving their usability features. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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