FW: Why Open Source Sucks for the Consumer

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

> > From: Guido van Rossum [mailto:guido@beopen.com]
> > Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 11:18 AM
> > To: Jean Camp
> > Cc: fsb@crynwr.com
> > Subject: Re: Why Open Source Sucks for the Consumer
> > 
> > 
> > > Linux is not only not ready for prime time its not even ready for
> > > pay-per-view.
> > 
> > Hear, hear.  Amen.
> > 
> > I *still* haven't figured out how to tell my machine the proper
> > timezone (there's a configuration program that appears to let me set
> > it, but it's utterly ignored).

I never had any trouble with doing that during initial setup, but 
I'm not sure how to change it without RTFMing.  On a Debian system,
at least you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be under
/etc somewhere.
> > 
> > Floppy management is pathetic (the default in this -- commercially
> > "supported") version isn't even good to read/write DOS floppies, the
> > only relevant exchange format).

Well I always thought it'd be nice if something would detect insertion
of a floppy and try to mount it automatically, instead of that being a
separate operation.  I know it should be possible; floppy drives have
a switch which the OS can read the state of, telling whether there is 
a disk or not.  But the problem with that idea is that you can also
eject the disk manually.  The Mac got it right - there is no way you
can eject the disk without involving the OS in the process, therefore
it will have a chance to do any last-minute writing beforehand.

As it is, I have the Gnome mount buttons on my panel for all my 
removable-media drives, and it's not too bad to have to click on it
to mount or unmount the disk.
> > 
> > I can't sync my palmpilot -- there's an application, but configuration
> > is impossible and there's no information.

I've used both packages available for that, and started writing a 
nettebook conduit sometime last year, but never finished it.  The Java
one was quite friendly, it just didn't have any conduits written for it
yet, at the time; by now there probably are some.  But it should be
available as a Debian package.  And Java stuff in general is not going
to fit well into the "desktop" until you no longer need a whole separate
VM instance for each application that you run; it's silly.  I don't know
why Sun hasn't tried to push some kind of standard for that yet - running
multiple applications, each with their own "main", in a single VM, by
a command-line means.

PalmPilots may be irrelevant in a year or two, if Linux-based PDAs take
over.  But it could turn into a living hell too, if the only thing they
have in common is Linux; so far they're all separate development efforts
with incompatible GUI systems (one uses Java, one uses X) and incompatible
applications.  And I could see them taking different approaches to things
like the filesystem too (which filesystem?  do you put it in memory or
FLASH? or do you ditch it altogether and just assume that since memory
is nonvolatile, applications are started once, run forever with no bugs
and no memory leaks, and there is no need to "save" data onto "disk",
only to back it up to your desktop machine.)

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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