On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 12:12:13PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 12:57:51PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > I dunno. What do you want that's more authoritative than one developer's
> > opinion?
> Your points are well put. I think they're a bit far afield from
> the original point (I was contesting Turbo's claims about "our
> PRIMARY audience" (note plural) and their historical truth)
Yah, sure. I've been getting oversensitive recently and having
non-developers trying to insist that Debian should or shouldn't do
something irritates me at the best of times. *shrug*
> We already have several answers to that question, both in this thread
> and historically:
> - Sysadmins running servers (from Turbo)
> - Users of entirely free operating systems (from me, and presumably
> the FSF folks)
> - Debian developers (eloquently put by Manoj)
> - Everyone (the original Debian Must Have Netscape crowd, I presume)
An interesting one, IMO, is "OEM developers" -- ie, people who want to
put together a standard system of their own construction based on Debian.
A couple of use cases could be someone who just sells boxes with a fairly
simple Debian variant pre-installed, or a network admin who'd like to
be able to easily dump an install on thirty or a hundred machines and
have them all work in basically the same way.
There's also embedded systems developers, software developers, "end users"
(in the, "they'll use what we tell them, but if it doesn't work well,
we'll bleed money until we die" sense), home users (make it easy, have
some games, make it possible to do some basic tasks, and follow some of
the latest fads), scientific researchers (writing papers, doing analysis,
doing simulations), HAM radio enthusiasts...
Not to forget people who're trying to topple Microsoft just for the sake
of it, or who're trying to help the underprivleged in various forms, or
the people who want to see their name up in lights or their pet project
get more acclaim, or similar sorts of things.
> I'm sure there are other opinions that I have missed :) I would be
> interested in seeing them, actually. I agree with you that it is
> quite possible to have all of them in one project, mainly because
> identifying a _primary_ audience does not exclude helping _secondary_
> audiences.
I don't really see how you could realistically say any of them are more
"primary" than any of the others. You could base it on how much time and
effort gets put into it, or you could base it on how well we compare
against the best-of-breed in the particular field, but those are much
more on the "effect" side of the scale than the "cause". Considering
people usually want to talk about "primary audience" with a view to
encouraging people to do something it's not much good saying -- hey,
our primary audience is <foo>, which means we already put lots of effort
in to supporting them, and we're already really good at it, so let's,
umm, keep on doing that!
*shrug*
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
-- http://www.angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
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