Re: SEUL: request for comments on independence document (fwd)

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net>]

Roger R Dingledine wrote:
> 
> First of all, Stefan: are you actually on this list?
> If not, you should subscribe. :) You can read the back-articles
> (including this thread so far) at
> http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/
> 

I made a mistake; I didn't confirm the confirmation message. I did now,
and browsing through the archives I saw that my message had arrived and
I read the follow-ups. I must thank you for forwarding it to the list.

To answer some of the questions forthcoming from it:

Why I wrote this: I was kind of disappointed that the Linux community is
not super-robust. I once followed a flame war of GNOME against KDE, for
instance, and off course all the stuff against newbies. This makes the
community a little unstable and that is exactly what we don't need (I
see it as internal FUD). Free software will continue to exist with or
without this little unstability, so you might wonder what I am
complaining about.

Someone once said that you don't have to choose between software today
for its quality, but only for the affection you have with it, it's
"image". A whole lot of Linux users tend to like their product just
because of its community image. As this image represents the product, a
bad community image would result in bad feelings about the product. I
want to keep the moral high (also my own), and so I tried to deal with
the problem by mentioning it and showing a way out.

As for the big business part: I personally think that businesses will do
some good work, because they are more motivated to make Linux an
all-users product than the geek-in-the-street. So I set my hope on a
happy end on them, and that is why they are mentioned in the end of my
text (I don't write dramas :-). But actually they are of minor
importance: they can write as good software as they want, as long as the
"dummies" are still ignored by the community, I think we haven't come
any further.

As for the typo's: after re-re-re-reading, I myself even noticed some
typo's in this version :-|. As for the strange sentences: I have this
tendency to translate Dutch sentences literally into English without
thinking. My English teacher still hates me for that :-). I don't know
if I'll ever have a good occasion for further publishing, but in that
case I think I'll have to re-re-re-re-read it...

Thanks,

Stefan