Re: SEUL: Is there a user for S.E.U.L.?

[Jay Bloodworth <jay@pathways.sde.state.sc.us>]

This is a nice segue into a topic I brought up earlier and would like to
return to: Focusing SEUL on the organizational rather than the home user. 
Let's face it: Bill Gates didn't make $20 billion by selling lots of $200
boxes of MS Office to home users - he sold them to the tech departments of
big organizations who installed them all of their users' machines and to
computer manufacturers who sell machines with MS software preinstalled.  I
think we need to focus on making SEUL appealing to the first group -
organization IS managers - because if we can sell enough organizations on
Linux, computer manufacturers will start selling preinstalled Linux
systems. 

The point is I think we should create a SEUL that we can sell to IS
managers rather than to end users (yes, I realizes its S_EU_L).  This
doesn't change the fact that we still need a nice desktop/frontend; IS
people won't buy anything that their users can't use (well, they
shouldn't). But over and above the need for an attractive UI, I think we
need to give SEUL the features to make it the ultimate 'intranet' OS.  To
wit:

* Network installation:  Use the CD to install on one machine, then just
boot with a floppy to install over the wire on the rest.

* Good interoperation with lot's of network protocols: Linux does IPX,
Samba, Appletalk.  Let's make sure SEUL does them well.

* Dynamic configuration: It's getting to be a DHCP world out there.  IS
people don't like to manage huge blocks of static IPs.  Can you blame
them?

* Network Application support: This includes transparent access to apps on
network file systems as well as networkable menu management, ie you add
app xyz to the server and it shows up on the appropriate users menu's next
time they reboot.

* Other intranet goodies: We need to provide good mail/news/IRC/WWW/ftp
clients out of the box and provide a means to configure them sensibly for
the local environment.

* Lots O Apps: This is an are where we see both the shine and the tarnish
of the current Linux/Free Software world: We've got The Gimp, but no whiz
word processor to paste its images into.  We've got half a dozen SQL
backends, but I don't know of any real good front end.  While we all may
be able to contribute to remedying these deficiencies as our talents and
interests allow, I don't think that really falls under the scope of SEUL.
We'll just have to be patient and do the best we can with what we have.

Jay



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