Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 20:22:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek <tim@x22> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: hoek@hwcn.org, Francisco Reyes <francisco@natserv.com>, FreeBSD Chat List <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Why Not Make tcsh the default shell? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970702200642.5527B-100000@x22> In-Reply-To: <16549.867883382@time.cdrom.com>
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[Cc: trimmed] On Wed, 2 Jul 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > But as a group of people who are trying to be professional OS > "vendors", that is simply not our determination to make. Like family, > one does not choose one's customers (as much as one would often like > to, in both cases). Hah. As a professional OS vendor, would it not make more sense to pursue the customers who bring the highest returns on the investment spent to attract them? > Now the techno-elitist, of which there are many in the UNIX world, > will always look at this classic problem and say "change the user", > whereas the product-realist says "accomodate the user, if possible, > since negative user feedback actually indicates _our_ failure." Once again, yes, it indicates _our_ failure to change the user! I'm not going to argue against the idea that users of all sorts should be accomodated (in part because I agree with the idea :), but it doesn't hurt to point out that one can be too narrow-minded with the "accomodate the user" mindset, just as one can be too narrow-minded with the "change the user" mindset. > I am a realist, and I say that if people aren't reading the docs then > we simply have to make the installation process less reliant on such > doc-reading prerequisites. The old adage about leading a horse to 10% do read, remember? The question is the investment spent on this 10% is well-spent. [Again, I see you hauling-out your techno-elitist argument, with comparisons to family members. However, as realists, we can surely see that sometimes (I am _not_ suggesting "always"!) one _must_ concentrate on satisfying the group of higher-paying customers]. > water comes to mind here, and even the techno-elitist will agree that > in designing any complex system, a good engineer attempts to avoid > putting undue strain on the weaker areas of it or what's being built > will probably only fall down. This goes for everything from bridges > to large software systems, and in the latter case it's typically the > user which is the weakest component of all. Are you trying to say that all users are equally important to FreeBSD? I don't think that this does justice to your efforts, or the efforts of other major FreeBSD contributors.
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