On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 01:17:33AM -0500, Alfredo Valles wrote: > >"our users" refers to people who *are* users of Debian, not to some > >indefinite market segment we might wish to capture in the future. > But don't you think an underpaid Doctor who work all day for healing a > serius desease for a 3th world country and only have 2 hours a day to > sit in his computer have the rigth to enjoy GNU/Debian as much as a 15 > year old boy who spend 10 hours a day investigating the system? > Don't you think these kind of persons are a user segment that debian > should enforce to please to. > What social contribution are you talking about then? Are you making this > system just to please yourself? I would like Debian to be accessible to everybody. However, as an administrator, I believe many efforts to make Linux distributions accessible to end users are misguided, because they blur the line between *use* and *administration*. This is understandable; Microsoft has spent a lot of effort trying to convince the public that any idiot should be able to administer a computer (why, just look at the MCSE program). But while I want Debian to be an empowering operating system that grows with the user, I think any strategy that expects users to also be administrators is a losing one -- no matter how easy we make it to administer that system. I think getting Debian into the hands of doctors in 3rd-world countries is a great idea -- but I think the way to do that is by giving those doctors pre-configured systems, not by giving them a box of CDs. Anything that asks that doctor to spend even one hour of his time making the system work is a misapplication of resources. Improving the installer helps administrators, but to benefit *users*, we should also be working on improving the social infrastructure so they don't *have* to know the difference between 75dpi and 100dpi fonts. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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