Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 20:10:20 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk> Cc: "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011101193854.K2921-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <20011101164226.B47017@jake.akitanet.co.uk>
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On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Paul Robinson wrote: > 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. Well, this thread has somehow moved at least a bit away from what originally started it. So, I guess what I'm going to say about the above text by Paul will bring it even further away, but, nevertheless I'll do it: 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! Have a look at my mother for example: She's using Windows, and it took her quite a long time to even learn to use Word. Learning how to properly use Outlook and Internet Explorer took her about as long as it took me to learn C. Taking that into account, it would probably be a bad idea to "force" my mother or any other "normal" PC user to use something like FreeBSD. Now, what should we do? Should we turn FreeBSD into something that's about the same as Windows - just stupid point-and-click? Hell, no! FreeBSD is obviously designed for more advances users and purposes. It's entirely fine that way - we are not Microsoft, and so we don't need to come up with mean ideas to force people to use FreeBSD. We leave people the free choice to do it, and the way I see it, there are quite a lot of people out there - both advanced hobbyists, programmers, professional users and so on, who'd like to get their fingers on something more fexible, read: FreeBSD. It's the goal of the FreeBSD Project to make that possible - the goal is *not* to produce a point-and-click-even-my-hamster-can-use-it operating system. That's perfectly right. You can look at any other product category out there and you will find products specially made for "normal" home users, and other products made for the pros. I would really say that our operating system *is* not for everybody. But that's by design and nothing we have to worry about. It's intended to be that way. Every user is free to obtain and use FreeBSD, but they must be willing to learn. The more flexible, complex and powerful something is, the more one has to learn about it. Again, this is not only so in the field of computer operating systems. However, we were originally talking about standards. Let's come back to that. I guess there are official W3C standards and similar things that allow web developers to do about anything that's really neccessary to produce a great (and useful) online experience. Microsoft has, as is proven, tried to "mess up" these standars and produced new standards that make little sense (Active X). The goal of all that was only to make it harder for competitors to stay compatible. Users and programmers have realized that by now, and it's only a matter of time how long they will continue to play the game by the MS rules. After all, I guess there's nothing in the computer industry that all kinds of people hate as much as Microsoft (or is there?). Currently, people still play the game the way MS wants to because MS is virtually in control of these people and the industry as a whole. This is most likely going to change rather sooner than later, and then MS will only be a normal company like anyone else. I can't predict that for sure, however, I think that it will eventually happen. Let's look back again: I think this thread was started because some bank rejected access to their site for non-MS systems for no technical reasons. What has been said in this thread today has very little to do with that basic and simple fact. I guess we let ourselves get carried away quite a little. However, it was still funny ;-) 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-chat" in the body of the message
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