Re: voice recognition and SEUL purpose

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <feb3415.360d1504@aol.com>, eamorical@aol.com writes:
>Concerning SEUL, here's the problem. On the home page it states "The goal
>of SEUL is to help Linux become an OS that the average home/office user
>can install and use productively". In the "What" paragraph it states "Our goal
>is to help create a computer operating environment". Pete looks at this and
>says it's about an OS. I look at it and say no it's about more than an OS. The
>problem is that it's an inconsistant message and this is being carried over
>into the survey. Anyway thanks for your input. It will be very helpful in
>trying
>to sort this out.
>
>Bob

Maybe I can help to sort this out. 
http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/announce/Jun-1998/msg00000.html has the
beginnings of an answer to what we are these days. But I can be more concise
than that: I want Linux -- and the idea of free software -- to take over the
world. 

There are lots of things that need to be done before we can achieve that
goal. We need technical work to be done on it, for sure -- but that's
somebody else's problem for right now. We need advocacy; seul has been
working on that, with the whylinux document and a couple howto's in progress
(check out the seul-dev-apps list for what Doug is working on there). We
need documentation; seul ought to work more on that, but it's a huge
project. We need user-friendliness guidelines and actual implementations of
that: gnome and kde are doing more for that than seul could do. We need a
good easy universal installer. yiyus has restarted that discussion in
seul-dev-install. Perhaps it will go somewhere. We need good sysadmin and
config tools; linuxconf and coas are headed in that direction, but they
suck for various reasons.

And there are a lot more. Fortunately, seul isn't the only project trying
to achieve this global goal. There are a lot of other projects (check out
my links page -- www.seul.org/what/links.html) that are approaching this
from various directions. I've been working with them (particularly with
Independence) to better coordinate the areas we're both working in. One of
my activities lately has been to keep track of what other people are doing, 
so group A and group B don't overlap (or are aware that they're overlapping).
This doesn't have a direct product, but it's still vital.

So that's the global reason for seul's existence. As for the survey
itself, I think the best goal we can push for right now is to raise
awareness of end-user issues. We will be collecting quantitative data about
this and that, but my instinct says we already know the answer to most of
it. Yes, we will be able to say "70% of the people we surveyed thought it
was vital to have good smp support" -- and that is a very nice thing to be
able to say, if we get it. But the people working on the kernel already
know it would be a good thing to have good smp support.

Getting people to think "hey, I wonder if the guy next door could use this
program I wrote even if it has all these cryptic error messages. It wouldn't
be that difficult to make those more useful." is the most important thing
that we're going to do. If we say "normal users are important too!" loudly
enough and often enough, people will start to accept it as normal and true.

I guess that means that the survey has a couple short-term goals and a
couple long-term goals.

We're trying to figure out what people want their computer to do. Once we
have this information, we will be using it primarily for the linux
community itself, though it might be a good method of tracking how far
Linux has come, when we look at data over the space of a year or more,
and convincing people that Linux has become a viable commercial-grade OS.

Yes, it's about more than just a kernel. End-users don't care which part is
the OS and which part is the application -- if the Linux kernel had
built-in wysiwyg wordprocessing, from their perspective that would be great.

I hope I wasn't completely incomprehensible here...:}
Questions/comments invited.

--Roger