Re: Was the release of Debian 2.0 put on Linux Announce?
> The responses to George's suggestion were . . . interesting. I wonder
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> if the majority of developers share this hostility towards new users.
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> It would certainly have a sobering effect on my enthusiasm for Debian
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> (and I suspect others as well). Linux needs Debian, but Debian needs
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> users. The last thing I want to see is a Linux community dominated by
> commercial distributions, but Debian can't succeed in the long run
> without appealing to a wide user base, so as to have some influence on
> the direction that Linux goes. You would think that based on the tone
> of the Debian website, Debian is meant to appeal to wide array of
> people. But the responses George got suggest otherwise.
>
Good, I think I am starting to see some good sense in this whole discution.
Forgetting the version numbers matter (that was showed to be somehow silly
after George remembered LSB in his *second* posting), what I really could not
understand and neither expect was the hostility to newbies.
Oh, yes, I agree with that community staff. This is one of the major issues in
Linux that atract me. But shouldn't we be a community open to the others?
Shouldn't we initiate people into "light" of open software? Surely lots of
people that don't "contribute to community" may start after a while. Maybe,
like me, they won't be developers (some surely will), but they can share their
knowledge with freasher newbies, they can say: hey, you have a choise, you're
not supposed to use this or that OS, you don't have to fight againt, but you
may fight with.
I am using Debian for a year and a half and I think it is the best. But I also
thought people over there were polite and reasonable, and, unfortunately, that
was not what I could find out in *some* e-mails in this thread. Does anyone
doubt that George is an Debian supporter and that everything he was saying,
even if nonsense, should be treated with good will?
One last point, that was already said out there is: being able to run *any*
kind of linux software is surely technical excellence. I, for example, use
Fortran 90 to code numerical stuff. And I was not able to find a free Fortran
90 compiler, so I have to use commercial software. So why should I drop Debian
to use it. No way! And I hope I will never be obliged to do it.
Paulo.
PS: To whom may be interested there is a frotran 90 - fortran 77 (g77)
translator free for non-commercial use in the net. Take a look at:
http://www.psrv.com/
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