Re: Why Indy

[Andrew Wood <ivarch@cus.org.uk>]

Here's my attempt at poking at the text of this a little. Just a couple of
very minor grammatical alterations and rewordings - most of the text is
still the same. I may easily have introduced mistakes myself...

Hope this is of some use.

- Andrew


On Sat, Jul 22, 2000 at 02:49:34AM +0200, JF Martinez wrote:
> The following text states Indy's goals.
>
		    Why Indy
		    _________

Many Linux users don't fit into the traditional model envisioned by
distribution makers, and that means their needs are not covered by
traditional distributions.  That is why it is time Linux users take
charge and make a distribution designed by them, for them.

We Linux users are different from Unix users.  Many of us cannot call
a system administrator to solve our problems and we don't have
instructors to teach us as people using Unix in large organizations
(small ones or individuals couldn't afford it) used to have.  From our
first minute of Linux use we have to face _all_ the maintenance and
administration of our Linux computers at a moment we don't even know
such basic commands as 'cat' or 'cp'.

This means that cryptic utilities or lack of configuration tools are not
acceptable when users have to work by themselves from minute one, as
happens in Linux.  Abandoning people at the end of installation with an
insecure box or a suboptimal kernel should be treated as a shooting offence
since we are dealing with people who will have to spend months before
knowing enough to fix this kind of problems.

Reading a thousand page book just for configuring sendmail or an over two
thousand page book of HOWTOs is only possible when you have nothing to do
except system administration.  In a big organization where hundreds of
people are making money for it, having an employee not doing directly
productive work is not a problem but a three person medical cabinet
obviously cannot afford an additional employee doing little else but
reading docs.  If we look at individuals such a "learning overhead" means
the user would be let with little time for real work.  And we don't think
filling our heads with every detail of sendmail configuration is the
highest thing we can do with a computer.  This means that Linux
distributions should come with sensible default config files and if at all
possible provide turnkey configurations for common usage.  It also means
that we cannot assume that the system administrator is a guru and accept a
distribution who breaks in face of the slightest mistake performed by the
system administrator.

Linux could go in small companies but the pressure of traditionalists has
distributions shipping server software like sendmail which is an overkill
in small organizations and in addition tend to be difficult to configure,
resource hungry and insecure.


Now that Linux has games, office suites like Star Office or Koffice, high
quality free multimedia or graphic tools like Blender, Gimp or
Broadcast2000 we feel there are many more uses to Linux than web or file
serving.  Every distribution configures the Ethernet card at install time
but we are abandoned at the end of installation with unconfigured sound
cards, screens under X which waste 1 inch at each side of the screen or
defaulting to using fonts bad enough to make our Wysiwyg word processors
nearly unusable.  And no distribution comes without Samba or DNS servers
and no user guide fails to document how to configure them but little or
nothing is told about using the Gimp and many cool multimedia tools are
left out of distributions.

We want to use Linux at home where Internet access is different to that in
offices, but few distributions give the same treatment to dialup or ADSL
users they give to people on LANs, or make the trivial changes needed for
making connections shorter (thus cheaper) or mail being automatically sent
when the connection is established.  And few distributions include the kind
of software from games to personal finance you would like to have when the
computer is not working for your boss but for you.


All these deficiencies need to be fixed and we believe that the best
people for understanding and fixing them are the people who suffer
from them or at least those who have some sympathy for the "sufferers"
and strongly want Linux to not be confined to the geek realm.  However
don't think that Indy will be able one day to fulfill its objectives
and be able to do something for you if you don't do something for it.