From: richb@jti.com (Richard Braun) Subject: Re: It's installed, now what? (was Re: A flight of marketing fancy) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:24:14 GMT
pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) writes:
>I think Linux will eventually get around to satisfying people of your
>ilk. That is, non-hacker end user just trying to balance the
>checkbook and write a letter.
You misinterpret my own background: I'm a hacker with a long background
of developing portable software. But I don't want to use a lot of my
spare time doing it, particularly just to get YAU (yet another Unix) up
and running. If I'm to spend my spare time working on YAU, I'd like to
be doing it in coordination with other engineering folks who are working
on a cohesive plan. If there is such a group of people cooperating on
Linux development, I'd certainly like to learn more about that circle.
>But first, there is a huge crowd of able bodied and capable unix
>literate users that Linux will appeal to, and they are the primary
>target. Why? Because they are actually capable of contributing to
>the improvement of the system. So you can almost think of this
>as a recruitment drive.
I think this approach is limiting. It has led to such monumental
efforts as MIT Project Athena which have produced far fewer spinoffs
than were originally intended. (How many people here know that X
Window is *not* an Athena spinoff? Or that the Athena environment
still runs in exactly one place--the MIT campus?) What ends up
happening is you have a hacker's system written by hackers for other
hackers, and since the lusers who rely on primitive software like MS
Word and Excel don't matter anyway, the system never strives toward a
goal behind hackerdom.
>When most major problems are solved, the "I don't really care how it
>works" crowd can be serviced.
Systems as complex as Linux are never "finished". There will always be
yet another major problem ready and waiting for the hackers to pursue.
Should that stop the system itself from reaching beyond its present
boundaries? I hope not.
>Until then, you may want to stick with DOS/WINDOWS, painful
>as it may be.
Hopefully I have more to contribute than that... It's tempting to at
least research the difficulty of writing a Windows-capable DOS emulator.
It's certainly possible--VP/ix does it.
-rich