Sorry, JB, I usually avoid posting (hence the trash email address), but not today because this hit home. On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 22:06 +0000, JB wrote: > Clyde E. Kunkel <clydekunkel7734 <at> cox.net> writes: > > > ... > > All this said, I am beginning to believe Fedora is more and more an > > experiment in social engineering. > > ... > > That's a well-chosen remark :-) > "Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing > actions...". Sometimes this does seem the case, but on the other hand considering the size of the open source community these days (as opposed to say, 1994, before there was a real label for it) there is no way to make a decision that everyone will agree with. There are too many people to please and no possible way everyone can communicate everything to each other and discuss prior to making a decision on something. Of course, these days blogging has trained people to be more self-important *and* noisier than ever. Another way of saying this is perhaps that the self-important used to do more and say less, and by simply doing they were de facto in charge. Argument from irrelevant people clogs lists more than it used to -- or perhaps I am getting old and nostalgic. Of course the "quietly doing" part above is, and forever will be, the secret to having things your way in open source -- or actually in any tech. Working implementations of ideas carry far more weight than any argument in a mailing list. > I am also surprised (have been for long time) by seeing Linux projects violating > UNIX principles of software development. > In this particular context, I am disappointed that they, apparently, lack > oversight by management, starting with the design phase. This does not surprise me in the least. As open source has become more high profile it has attracted the attention of and absorbed the vanity developers who used to write their pet apps in Pascal, QBASIC or Java on Windows (or OS/2 if they were l33+), and now play with whatever vanity language is popular this week from within the confines of whatever open source project they think will make them famous(ish). This sort of developer often can't tell you who Fred Brooks, Eric Raymond, Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, or anyone similar are and haven't read anything they've written for our benefit about design or the Unixy way to solve problems. Chicken lipstick is in high demand, automated text processing through intelligent use of shell scripts is down, overly complex solutions are up, overweight software is up, the number of people who have ever learned to configure their system starting with a minimal install (not even touching the number of users who can't build their own system from source) is way down, etc. These are simply signs that the community has changed because the people who remember what the Unixy way of doing things was has become a much smaller percentage of the population as we've absorbed a million haX0r d00dz from the Windows world. That expansion is not bad and the new guys certainly mean well, but we've definitely not done enough to familiarize newcomers with the history of Unix, who the original old guys were, what they were thinking, and the depth of thought that went into a project before the first line of code was written back in the day. It doesn't help that C and Lisp are considered "too hard" to teach in allegedly credible CS undergrad courses these days. Specific discussion in class about what happens within a compiler and how processors actually process things has been replaced with rather vague generalities (those are "deep subjects that you don't need to worry about") and freed the instructors to focus on teaching elementary problem solving in Java and Python as if it is deep CS skill. In other words, elementary problem solving logic and problem deconstruction theory is now masquerading as deep computer science -- the technicals are scary so they are to be avoided (what if my students aren't smart enough to pass?!? I might look like a bad instructor -- best avoid pointer math and recursion this go-around...). Without achieving that critical mass of fundamental knowledge it is very difficult for newcomers to the community to identify exactly why the Unix way is better than the Windows way. Their choice to join the open source community is therefore based largely on emotional and social factors -- this is counter-cultural, it's against The Man/M$/Whoever, "I think I have better security (but I don't know what that means on a deep level)", its cheaper, etc. -- not on technical grounds. Any reason is adequate in my view, but without a firmly set social more that guides newcomers to familiarize themselves with the roots of Unix and do their basic homework we cannot realistically expect Linux to remain Unixy forever. Just my $2.00. -Iwao -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
