From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) Subject: Re: It's installed, now what? (was Re: A flight of marketing fancy) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 21:55:48 GMT
From: richb@jti.com (Richard Braun)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:24:14 GMT
>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.
Actually, the approach taken by Project Athena and Linux are quite
different. Project Athena was written in exactly one place: at MIT.
Linux is being developed all over the world. The goals of Project
Athena was did not include taking over the world (although that would
have been nice), and so the fact that there weren't a lot of spinoffs
isn't that important. I should mention, though, that the Athena
environment has been exported to other sites; it is not true that it is
only running at MIT. You can buy it from DEC as "DECathena", and there
have been a couple of other sites which have picked up the Athena
distribution and set it up on their own. Granted, not a lot, but there
are some.
Anyway, I digress. I also think it is misleading for people to say that
Linux has "this target audience", or "that target audience". Peter's
SLS distribution may have a certain well defined audience, but different
people will have different viewpoints on this issue. My viewpoint (as
an admitted hacker) is that I don't particularily care whether or not
Linux ever supplants MS-DOS or OS/2. I'm not an ideologue like some of
the people at the FSF are. So if Linux is only used by just the
hackers, that's O.K. (at least for me). There are an awful lot of
hackers out there, and as long as we can get useful work done on Linux,
and as long as we can compile freely available programs which work
POSIX, a lot of people will be quite happy.
- Ted