Getting people into Linux

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 00:55:08 AM +1030, Tim
(ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au) wrote:

> William Case:

> >> This a free and open source movement, fuelled in no small part by
> >> personal competition between developers trying to do better than
> >> the other guy or trying to be the best.
> 
> M. Fioretti:
> > But only in the fields _THEY_ personally care about, which so far
> > have never included usability by non-techies
> 
> "Never"?  Are not Firefox and Thunderbird free open-source software?

Sure. Born out of commercial software (= developed by people paid full
time just to do that) and now financially backed by a foundation. Not
exactly the garage development model, made for fun or to solve a
personal problem, explicitly described in the statement to which I
replied.

> Are they not usable by non-techno-geeks?

Sure, but for the reason above Firefox and Thunderbird just have
nothing to do with what I and William said. 

> 
> > or desktops which are fully functional and usable by non techies on
> > low spec machines.
> 
> That goes for Windows, these days, too.  When you throw in everything
> and the kitchen sink, it needs a lot of grunt to drive it.

Correct. One of my main disappointments with modern FOSS desktop (but
also a perhaps unavoidable consequence of what I answered to William)
is just the fact that they throw in a lot of unnecessary kitchen
sinks, even if they have less reason than Windows to do so.

Ciao,
	Marco

-- 
The right way to make everybody love Free Standards and Free Software:
http://digifreedom.net/node/73