Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 16:13:12 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Miguel Mendez <flynn@energyhq.homeip.net> Cc: Nils Holland <nils@daemon.tisys.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The road ahead? Message-ID: <3CE43D08.1FDBF0A3@mindspring.com> References: <20020516004909.A9808@daemon.tisys.org> <20020516151801.A47974@energyhq.homeip.net> <20020516172853.A7750@daemon.tisys.org> <3CE40759.7C584101@mindspring.com> <20020516220616.A51305@energyhq.homeip.net>
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Miguel Mendez wrote: > > Bad style and practices were therefore enshrined; and none dare > > criticize them. In fact, we see echos of this most strongly in > > console based programs... like the FreeBSD installer. > > Terry, you've just found a way of revenue for the FreeBSD project. > > 1) Give the OS away > 2) Remove *all* man pages and online documentation > 3) Make the system horrendously obfuscated > 4) Become rich by selling FreeBSD manuals at $100 a pop :-) A) #1 already happens B) #2 is defacto done; compare the info and man pages for gcc or gld, some day C) #3 is defacto done D) #4 Doesn't work in the presence of a monopolist with a competing product who doesn't pull the same pig-trick The proof for (D) is that Word Perfect owned the Word Processing market at one point in time, but then ended up losing it when they tried to turn support into a profit center. They did that, rather than fixing the product so that it didn't generally require as much support (e.g. putting "Help" on "F4" was a really stupid human factors decision). I understand that they were trying to exercise the philosophy of "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade"; but those weren't lemons, they were dog-droppings, and you'd think someone would have realized that before they decided to build a huge bottling plant... Kind of gets us back to the original rant, which really comes down to the failure of stupid business models... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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