From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jul 2 17:23:15 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA03496 for chat-outgoing; Wed, 2 Jul 1997 17:23:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from x22 (ppp1655.on.sympatico.ca [206.172.249.119]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA03484 for ; Wed, 2 Jul 1997 17:23:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (tim@localhost) by x22 (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id UAA05543; Wed, 2 Jul 1997 20:22:17 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 20:22:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek Reply-To: ac199@hwcn.org To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: hoek@hwcn.org, Francisco Reyes , FreeBSD Chat List Subject: Re: Why Not Make tcsh the default shell? In-Reply-To: <16549.867883382@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk [Cc: trimmed] On Wed, 2 Jul 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > But as a group of people who are trying to be professional OS > "vendors", that is simply not our determination to make. Like family, > one does not choose one's customers (as much as one would often like > to, in both cases). Hah. As a professional OS vendor, would it not make more sense to pursue the customers who bring the highest returns on the investment spent to attract them? > Now the techno-elitist, of which there are many in the UNIX world, > will always look at this classic problem and say "change the user", > whereas the product-realist says "accomodate the user, if possible, > since negative user feedback actually indicates _our_ failure." Once again, yes, it indicates _our_ failure to change the user! I'm not going to argue against the idea that users of all sorts should be accomodated (in part because I agree with the idea :), but it doesn't hurt to point out that one can be too narrow-minded with the "accomodate the user" mindset, just as one can be too narrow-minded with the "change the user" mindset. > I am a realist, and I say that if people aren't reading the docs then > we simply have to make the installation process less reliant on such > doc-reading prerequisites. The old adage about leading a horse to 10% do read, remember? The question is the investment spent on this 10% is well-spent. [Again, I see you hauling-out your techno-elitist argument, with comparisons to family members. However, as realists, we can surely see that sometimes (I am _not_ suggesting "always"!) one _must_ concentrate on satisfying the group of higher-paying customers]. > water comes to mind here, and even the techno-elitist will agree that > in designing any complex system, a good engineer attempts to avoid > putting undue strain on the weaker areas of it or what's being built > will probably only fall down. This goes for everything from bridges > to large software systems, and in the latter case it's typically the > user which is the weakest component of all. Are you trying to say that all users are equally important to FreeBSD? I don't think that this does justice to your efforts, or the efforts of other major FreeBSD contributors.