On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 00:55:08 AM +1030, Tim (ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > William Case: > >> This a free and open source movement, fuelled in no small part by > >> personal competition between developers trying to do better than > >> the other guy or trying to be the best. > > M. Fioretti: > > But only in the fields _THEY_ personally care about, which so far > > have never included usability by non-techies > > "Never"? Are not Firefox and Thunderbird free open-source software? Sure. Born out of commercial software (= developed by people paid full time just to do that) and now financially backed by a foundation. Not exactly the garage development model, made for fun or to solve a personal problem, explicitly described in the statement to which I replied. > Are they not usable by non-techno-geeks? Sure, but for the reason above Firefox and Thunderbird just have nothing to do with what I and William said. > > > or desktops which are fully functional and usable by non techies on > > low spec machines. > > That goes for Windows, these days, too. When you throw in everything > and the kitchen sink, it needs a lot of grunt to drive it. Correct. One of my main disappointments with modern FOSS desktop (but also a perhaps unavoidable consequence of what I answered to William) is just the fact that they throw in a lot of unnecessary kitchen sinks, even if they have less reason than Windows to do so. Ciao, Marco -- The right way to make everybody love Free Standards and Free Software: http://digifreedom.net/node/73
