Re: Linux is not for consumers!
On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 at 21:48 GMT, Richard Kimber penned:
>
>> If I were being paid to do this kind of thing, my boss might have a
>> more convincing argument as to why I should document my work.
>> However, for something I'm giving away for nothing, there's no such
>> obligation that I can see.
>
> Obligation? What about a sense of pride in having done something
> well?
Many project maintainers do have that sense of pride. But there's a
difference between "stuff that I really appreciate the developers doing
for me" and "stuff that the developers have a responsibility to do for
me."
> Of course, if you're just writing a program for your own personal use,
> and you allow others to use it freely if they can understand it,
> without any involvement from you, fine, but that's not the kind of
> system that the envisaged consumers can cope with. And I'm not
> convinced that that really is the underlying philosophy of Linux,
> which seems to be implicit in what you say.
I think the first sentence of that paragraph describes what Linus did
with Linux perfectly, and it describes many open source applications.
Personally, I could give a rat's ass about whether consumers want to use
debian. But regardless of whether I care, the fact is that there's
still this split between "what I want" and "what I'm owed." I want
perfect documentation, but I have no right to demand it. Opensource
software is offered as-is. If you ask nicely, you will often get
support, and often that support is amazing. But you have no right to
that support -- it's a gift that you should appreciate.
> If you're a developer, your attitude perhaps goes some way to explain
> why Linux is not for consumers.
Linux is a kernel. I can almost guarantee that you've never, for
example, discussed an implementation bug with a microsoft or apple
kernel developer.
The gripe is about "linux" as though all of the thousands of
applications that happen to run on linux are part of it. But the
reality is, they are separate projects. One app may have great
documentation; another may not. Would you blame microsoft because some
random application you bought from compusa had poor documentation?
--
monique
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