Re: About standards and politics

[JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

> 
> 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.
> 

SCO was 1 thousand dollars when Windows 3.11 was taking off.  No
private user would have dared to tell his wife he had spent so much
money on a program and still less for something who does no useful
work by itself.


> > > 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.
> 

Being the voice of the users, having a free project between the user
friendly distribs.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org