Re: About standards and politics (sorry, I had to fix it :-)

[Brian Wiens <wiensb@algonquinc.on.ca>]

Donovan Rebbechi wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Bud Beckman wrote:
>
> > Yep! That is something I was hollering about when I first started to put
> > my hands on a computer keyboard. We are consumers looking for the best
> > buy and not the best standard, sorry to say.
>
> Standards are ultimately good for consumers. So all other things equal,
> standards compliance gives the consumer a better deal. Note that
> in this example, removing standard utilities has no clear benefit for the
> user ...

I think that the point is that the consumer doesn't know that "the best
standard" = "the best buy in the long run".  Betamax vs. VHS is a good example
of this, where pricing, licensing and marketing of an inferior video recording
and playback "standard" killed the consumer market for the far better format.
In the consumers' mind, a good computer buy is one that does not require an
advanced degree in computers, a shelf of O'Reilly books and Usenet access to be
able to play Solitaire.  My mother (the infamous lowest common denominator :-)
is comfortable with Win9x, even with the crashes, the incompatibilities, et
al.  She doesn't know, and doesn't care, that the Evil Empire is going to kill
her long term computing environment with their monopolistic behaviour.

Sorry for the rant, but we have to remember our roots :-).  In support of
Donovan, there is nothing that forces the newbie to use vi.  On the other hand,
a barebones RH5.0 install is scary when you get dumped into that command line
and don't even know how to look at the contents of a text file, never mind edit
it.  Maybe a better symlink would be to something like "view" or "print" or
"see", pointing to ???? (see, I can't even remember how to do it since I've
been using KDE for the past while :-).  Just my $.02.

Brian