Debian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!"

[Liam Proven]

2009/8/20 Ray Leventhal <ubuntu at swhi.net>:

> My point was clearly misunderstood if it's been thought of as harmful.
>
> Lets try to make that point by example.
[...]
> I had a need and I took it upon myself to fix MY need.  The blogger who
> says that 'my need for a font manager isn't being met, therefore the
> FOSS community sucks' doesn't get it.  He wants it the way he wants it
> and he wants it for free.  That's not how it works, unless someone has
> already written it and seen fit to open the source for us all to
> use/modify/play with.  Mostly that model works really really well.  I
> thrive on it and revel in it.

But that is not what the post was about. You are misreading the
original post, AFAICS.

The point of the post was this:

 - something used to work fine
 - a programmer has come along and disabled it
     • 2 examples have been given:
       [1] a font that has been removed because someone felt its
functions were fulfilled elsewhere
       [2] a stylus setup tool that was removed because some
programmer disliked the programming tools used to create it and
intended to write something better but has never got round to it
 - both of these changes have resulted in a loss of functionality for end-users
 - because the programmers have a privileged position in the distro,
the changes will not be reversed
 - and the changes are very difficult for end-users to reverse or repair.

This is not some "learn to scratch your own itch" issue, this is an
issue of programmers making changes without consulting with the
community, for their own reasons, that result in a loss of
functionality.

This is something quite different from what you are going on about.

As far as your comments about learning to code and doing-it-yourself,
well, there's another position that you may not have considered.

I've been owning and using computers since about 1983, with some prior
experience over the couple of years before that. I have learned more
operating systems than I can remember; I have mastered literally
dozens of totally different platforms. I was a competent expert on
half a dozen before I ever met ancients like CP/M or VAX/VMS. I was
confident enough in about a dozen different text editors to train
people professionally; I have learned 4 or 5 programming languages.

I am tired of it. After more than a quarter of a century, the wretched
devices /still/ don't work right and still require endless coaxing and
fiddling. I don't /want/ to learn any more languages, tools, or
anything else.

To maliciously mutate an old saying, Mohammed has been coming to the
mountain for a generation and his feet are tired. It's time for the
mountain to come to Mohammed.

Ubuntu is making headway. Not a huge amount, but some. Most of the
other spinoffs are not, they're just people trying to make things work
the way *they* want, with no real consideration of what anyone else
wants.

Which is fine so long as they don't derail the main effort.
Personally,  I think Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc. just distract from the main
project, waste time and effort and pull people away from the main
event. But it's a free world, if that's what people want, fine.

They just need to realise that they /are/ harming the effort to
displace proprietary software. As Caesar allegedly said of Gaul, 2000
years ago, /Divide et impera/: divide and conquer.

Linux will never displace Windows so long as there are 200 versions of
it battling for people's attention. Then along came Ubuntu, one good
solid polished free distro. Everyone rallies around Ubuntu, pretty
much, so along come the splitters and divide Ubuntu up into 200 rival
metadistros.

But still, the blog post had a good point. What matters is making
something that works well for its users. Programmers' preferences for
a certain language, or for not having overlapping fonts, should be
subsidiary to this.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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