Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 21:54:48 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk>, "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011101214159.C27349-100000@howie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20011101131856.04a4b960@localhost>
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On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Brett Glass wrote: > At 12:10 PM 11/1/2001, Nils Holland wrote: > > >Speaking neither for the FreeBSD Project, nor for the OSS movement, I'd > >really like to ask if we really *want* mass acceptance? > > Yes. I love it when people try to minimize my bandwidth costs by sending short and precise answers... Seriously: How do you imagine it? Throw out the shell and make a GUI only thing? Will the masses out there ever use an OS where you have to type something like "find / \! -newer report.tex"? I'm not saying that X or KDE should not be used, but, as is well known, all GUIs mainly harm flexibility of a system. FreeBSD is here to be used by anyone out there who wants to - but I don't think that we should start producing "point-and-click-only" just because that's obviously easier for the masses (which included a whole lot of not very experienced users) to use. The masses can surely come to FreeBSD, but we really shouldn't trade flexibility and power to make our system attractive to them. My original statement may have sounded a little strange, but I still think that we're dealing with an operating system for a more advanced class of computer users. Everyone can join that advanced class at their free will. But no one can expect icons and strange comic-creatures in animated widnows telling them how to use the disklabel command (yes, this is a reference to this strange help system introduced by MS in Office 97 and up). Greetings Nils Nils Holland Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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