Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 02, 2004 02:23 AM
I think the whole community needs to step back for a while and determine just what exactly Linux wants to be.
This whole premise of easy-to-use yet powerful software is flawed. A powerful tool necessarily involves some training for the user. Would ESR have us build helicopters such that Aunt Tillie can fly them? No! A helicopter is a very powerful instrument, and as such, we expect that one has to learn many things in order to use it properly. If you don't learn to read the instruments and control the machine, it crashes. Just like Windows, what a coincidence!
If Aunt Tillie wants to fly, she can use a regular airplane, which is simpler. It can't hover in mid-air (because it isn't as powerful a tool), but it will get her from point A to point B.
Just like a helicopter, a computer suffers wear and tear, and, being amazingly complex, it breaks from time to time. You can't solve this problem with a good UI - the problem of writing failsafe computing environments is not the same thing as the problem of writing elegant user interfaces. When the computer inevitably breaks, you have two choices. Choice number one is to have the "ignorant" user call a technician. Ignorance is a luxury; let the user pay for it at about $80 an hour.
Open source has always been about power and flexibility. When Richard Stallman had his first experience with proprietary software - in the form of a printer driver, interestingly enough - his immediate problem with it was that it wasn't a sufficiently flexible software to meet his needs: he needed to adapt it at the source-code level.
If you want to serve the ends of power and flexibility, you cannot also serve the end of ignorant users. No other industry in the business of making powerful tools will dispute this fact. If you are in machine tools, and you purchase a CNC, you will have to train your employees to interface with it, and nobody has a problem with that. The real problem here is that Linux no longer knows what it wants to be. It wants to conquer the world somehow - to serve best the needs of both grandmothers on AOL and researchers at physics labs. Personally, I feel that the thrill which drove the growth of Linux is the thrill of making powerful software, making works of technical excellence. ESR says that we are too busy congratulating ourselves to wake up and start considering the needs of real users. I disagree. All of the millions of servers running Linux, and the researchers, and the university students learning from it, and so on - they are real users too. ESR is asking us to compromise quality for the sake of people who like cheap things. That may be the democratic thing to do, but it isn't the noble thing to do, and for once I say we take a stand for nobility. Ask the users to meet our standard of user quality, instead of letting them demand we make accomodations for their standard of simplicity. If we get 0% market share on the desktop, who cares, so long as we made something of great power and flexibility. That's our design goal. Technical excellence is a more noble end than market share. Who hasn't heard the saying: "I can only lead you to the door, it is up to you to open it?"
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The Linux identity crisis
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 02, 2004 02:23 AMThis whole premise of easy-to-use yet powerful software is flawed. A powerful tool necessarily involves some training for the user. Would ESR have us build helicopters such that Aunt Tillie can fly them? No! A helicopter is a very powerful instrument, and as such, we expect that one has to learn many things in order to use it properly. If you don't learn to read the instruments and control the machine, it crashes. Just like Windows, what a coincidence!
If Aunt Tillie wants to fly, she can use a regular airplane, which is simpler. It can't hover in mid-air (because it isn't as powerful a tool), but it will get her from point A to point B.
Just like a helicopter, a computer suffers wear and tear, and, being amazingly complex, it breaks from time to time. You can't solve this problem with a good UI - the problem of writing failsafe computing environments is not the same thing as the problem of writing elegant user interfaces. When the computer inevitably breaks, you have two choices. Choice number one is to have the "ignorant" user call a technician. Ignorance is a luxury; let the user pay for it at about $80 an hour.
Open source has always been about power and flexibility. When Richard Stallman had his first experience with proprietary software - in the form of a printer driver, interestingly enough - his immediate problem with it was that it wasn't a sufficiently flexible software to meet his needs: he needed to adapt it at the source-code level.
If you want to serve the ends of power and flexibility, you cannot also serve the end of ignorant users. No other industry in the business of making powerful tools will dispute this fact. If you are in machine tools, and you purchase a CNC, you will have to train your employees to interface with it, and nobody has a problem with that.
The real problem here is that Linux no longer knows what it wants to be. It wants to conquer the world somehow - to serve best the needs of both grandmothers on AOL and researchers at physics labs. Personally, I feel that the thrill which drove the growth of Linux is the thrill of making powerful software, making works of technical excellence. ESR says that we are too busy congratulating ourselves to wake up and start considering the needs of real users. I disagree. All of the millions of servers running Linux, and the researchers, and the university students learning from it, and so on - they are real users too. ESR is asking us to compromise quality for the sake of people who like cheap things. That may be the democratic thing to do, but it isn't the noble thing to do, and for once I say we take a stand for nobility. Ask the users to meet our standard of user quality, instead of letting them demand we make accomodations for their standard of simplicity. If we get 0% market share on the desktop, who cares, so long as we made something of great power and flexibility. That's our design goal. Technical excellence is a more noble end than market share. Who hasn't heard the saying: "I can only lead you to the door, it is up to you to open it?"
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