Re: About standards and politics

[Brian and Kathy Wiens <wiens@cyberus.ca>]

Donovan Rebbechi wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Brian Wiens wrote:
> 
> > I think that the point is that the consumer doesn't know that "the best
> > standard" = "the best buy in the long run".
> 
> Actually, I think they usually do.

And I still don't think that they do, otherwise they would have been
using some of the proprietary PC-based *nixes, rather than jumping on
the W9x bandwagon.  At least the proprietary *nixes are (mostly?) Posix
compliant, while M$ represents a very poor OS which is only the defacto
standard, due to pricing, marketing, et al.

> > Betamax vs. VHS is a good example
> > of this, where pricing,
> 
> See Jean's response.

I don't think that Jean's response disagreed with mine.  Licensing (ie
keeping it proprietary) killed Beta.  Only high end users in TV news,
etc, use Beta now - they are the only one's that care about the "best"
standard.  My point was, and remains, that users often don't realize or
care that they are buying second best.  We need to make sure that we
also get the users that only care about ease of use and couldn't give
two hoots about standards.

> > 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.
> 
> I doubt that linux is good for *her* in the long run.

Then Linux is no good for the vast majority of the world's computer
users.  Are we rolling over and playing dead already???  I thought that
"my mother" (or yours, or any one else's) was the market that we were
aiming for, in the long run.  If we don't care about them, then we have
very little point in going much further because the work that RedHat and
Caldera is doing is probably sufficient.

> > 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
> 
> 'view' is a problem (it's also standard). See ? maybe, but I still vote
> for edit (-;

I just think that "edit" is a little bit dangerous for the newbie, when
all they really want to do (or at least all that I often want to do) is
look at what the file says.  I'm not too worried about it though, just
thought I'd throw something different in the mix.

Brian