OT: Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 05:39:55PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:35 PM, George Nicol <gnicol-PeCUgM4zDv73fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > A very good illustration of why you promote the correct style of
> > Linux evangelism that you've always recommended on this listserv.
> > To some degree, railing against Microsoft is okay when preaching
> > to the choir at TLUG but always counterproductive when we take
> > the fight to them and attack them on a battlefield they hold.
> 
> I think it's an error to "play the game" of railing against Microsoft.
> 
> It's a particularly bad idea as the software that people keep
> promoting gets to be more and more conformant with "Microsoft-ish"
> approaches, as opposed to "Unix Philosophy" approaches.
> 
> Pointer back to Gancarz...
> - small is beautiful
> - make each program do one thing well
> - use software leverage to your advantage
> - avoid captive user interfaces
> - make every program a filter
> - use shell scripts to increase leverage
> 
> If we look at applications that people laud rather a lot, we get
> pretty much the diametric opposite to these principles with such
> notables as:
>  - OpenOffice.org
>  - Web browsers at large
> 
> The recent discussion about OpenOffice.org was pretty much the epitome
> of "Microsoft magic", what with the following diagnostics:
>  a) "I never could figure out what made it work again"
>  b) "There were several .openoffice.* directories to delete"
>  c) "Reboot to fix it!"
> 
> It seems to me that we're going in absolutely the wrong direction with
> both "office software" and web browsers...  In both cases, they
> violate the "Unix Philosophy" in *ALL* of the ways described above.
> 
> The tendancy to hack modules onto Firefox is just making this *worse.*
> http://www.cccs.de/wiki/pub/Main/VorTraege/uzbl-print.pdf
> 
> There are, in the case of web browsing, a couple of possible answers...
> - uzbl
> - surf
> 
> These are in somewhat nascent phases, where they're pretty
> deliberately unfriendly.  I don't believe that *needs* to be
> permanently the case; it's perfectly reasonable for "creature
> comforts" to grow around them.
> 
> In contrast, the "captive UIs" surrounding document writing software
> seem to also be bound up inside scripts that seem intended to make it
> harder to get at what something like OpenOffice.org is really doing,
> inside.  (Witness the whole "I had to delete all the .openoffice*
> directories, and reboot" thing).
> 
> It's unfair to bash Microsoft for going down particular roads when we
> seem hell-bent on taking the Same Sulphury Path!

Have you noticed that practically all open source applications that
are unstable and annoying all seem to have started out as closed source
commercial applications before someone gave up on them and tossed the
whole thing over the fence?

Certainly the case for mozilla (netscape), openoffice (staroffice),
and I am sure I could think of some more if I tried.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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