From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@athena.mit.edu> Subject: Re: Fonts not compressed, oopps Date: 22 Feb 1993 20:05:36 -0500
I think the primary thing that you're forgetting is the TQM (Total
Quality Management) question, "Who is the customer?" For commercial
software, the customer is fairly clear --- the naive users who paid cash
on the barrelhead to get a system which gets their job done.
For free software like Linux, "Who is the customer?" Is it the naive
users? No, they don't pay a cent for Linux. Well, who pays? The
developers, and the documentation writers, and the FTP maintainers, who
all put in their volunteer time to make Linux a reality. They are the
one who pay by devoting their free time to this effort. Without them,
Linux and all of the free software in the world wouldn't have gone
anywhere. The naive users are completely irrelevant in this picture;
the developers do work because it pleases them, and/or because they
needed some feature themselves, and was generous enough to share it with
the rest of us.
So, if the developers are the customers, than the priorities become very
clear. "The customer is always right". So if you want the
documentation to be better, the way to make it better is *not* to abuse
the developers telling them how worthless their code is. The way to
make it better is to become a developer yourself, and help to make the
documentation better. In that way, you can push your vision of what you
think Linux should be. In general, people get very upset at you if you
ask them to do work in order to support your version of reality.
This doesn't mean that Linux can't support naive users; it just needs
people like you (Michael Irons), who obviously cares about the needs of
those naive users, to actually put in some work to make Linux better,
just as I, who wanted POSIX job control, implemented it instead of
whining about how Linux was useless because it didn't have job control.
- Ted
P.S. Congratulations on getting Dirk pissed off enough that he may stop
doing X11 distributions in the future.