I like this attitude. It is reasonable, inoffensive, and downright Taoist in all the good ways. It is a perspective that is polite, while focusing on the truly important things.
Everyone should learn from reading ucblockhead's comment.
Software that doesn't suck is the ideal, as he says.
However, we are also talking about human minds here. Our standard methodologies of commercialism have spent the better part of this century learning how to manipulate these minds into buying products, and doing things a particular way, and expecting the markets to work in particular ways. If someone who looks credible appears on T.V., say, and says that this is the only way to do things, most people will believe it, especially if other ways of doing things are not even meantioned. Because of this, superior methods might often be ignored.
Remember, Open Source is a movement (with software that doesn't suck as its stated goal). And it is the responsibility of a movement to advertise itself, or risk dying.
In short, feasability and pragmatism aren't the only things governing the success of ideas. Propaganda plays a major role.
-- "So far, I have not found the science" - Soul Coughing
Slashdot Mirror
I like this attitude. It is reasonable, inoffensive, and downright Taoist in all the good ways. It is a perspective that is polite, while focusing on the truly important things.
Everyone should learn from reading ucblockhead's comment.
Software that doesn't suck is the ideal, as he says.
However, we are also talking about human minds here. Our standard methodologies of commercialism have spent the better part of this century learning how to manipulate these minds into buying products, and doing things a particular way, and expecting the markets to work in particular ways. If someone who looks credible appears on T.V., say, and says that this is the only way to do things, most people will believe it, especially if other ways of doing things are not even meantioned. Because of this, superior methods might often be ignored.
Remember, Open Source is a movement (with software that doesn't suck as its stated goal). And it is the responsibility of a movement to advertise itself, or risk dying.
In short, feasability and pragmatism aren't the only things governing the success of ideas. Propaganda plays a major role.
--"So far, I have not found the science" - Soul Coughing
Respectfully, thinking entirely of the future, it seems to me...
That nanotechnology is what will allow a quantum computer to fit in your watch.
-- "So far, I have not found the science" - Soul Caughing