Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 00:49:38 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: nik@FreeBSD.ORG (Nik Clayton) Cc: brett@lariat.org, dark@idiotswitch.org, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Looking for the actual proposal... Message-ID: <199909090049.RAA07586@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990908194548.A89429@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> from "Nik Clayton" at Sep 8, 99 07:45:48 pm
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> Brett, > > I think this is where the problem is: > > On Wed, Sep 08, 1999 at 09:32:27AM -0600, Brett Glass wrote: > > is that FreeBSD is lacking in good memes, which are more important than good > > code. > > On a very fundamental level, I think a lot of the FreeBSD developers (note, > not necessarily the users) disagree very strongly with that statement. I > doubt that you can change their minds. I believe Brett means "more important to achieving market share", not "more important in the sense of a universal epistimological scale of importance common to all measurements of importance". Coders are, by their nature, very Aristotilian (and therefore Boolean) in their logic. So I can see why you would think developers would disagree with Brett. But you also have to realize that not all goals are, by definition, mutually exclusive. Brett's goal of increased market share does not have to come at the expense of someone else's goal of "ultimate code quality": this is not a zero sum game, with proponents of market share on one side, and proponents of good code on the other. I realize that many people are of the opinion that Microsoft has ingrained the idea that market share must always come at the expense of quality, but this is a false dichotomy. Although the idea that short term profit must come at the expense of quality is not so hard to dismiss... one could easily see why people could make an erroneous connection between "short term profit" and "increased short term market share". I don't think Brett is interested in increased market share for FreeBSD, if there is a trade between the short term and the long term in order to get it. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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