-----Original Message----- From: social-admin@lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:social-admin@lists.alug.org.uk]On Behalf Of MJ Ray Sent: 13 October 2001 18:47 To: permanent@altavista.net Cc: Social@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [alug social] FW: (forw) Of Linux bigots
oms101@freeuk.com writes:
So why do I think we stand a chance of fixing the situation?
Simple - KDE and
GNOME. KDE and Gnome both solve the basic problem of making
writing GUIs
for applications on Unix a lot easier, making the applications
look good and
providing all the mod-cons that users expect (internationalisation, drag-drop, object linking etc).
Uh, did we need KDE or Gnome to provide them? Yes, they make some of them rather easier, but the core problems (translators, choice) aren't addressed by those hooge wedges of code in the current top desktop environments. Others (drag-drop) are perfectly possible just from the toolkit level.
- bigots are bad
Agreed.
Muslim fundamentalist or American red-neck with a rifle, Mac zealot or Microsoft hater - bigots are always stupid in my book.
* pragmatists and enthusiasts are good.Wrong! Pragmatists are the most terrible thing that we have ever been cursed with.
Why? AFAIA a pragmatist is a person who takes a practical approach to problems. What is the matter with that? I can understand that sort of reaction for anti-Microsoft zealots. Those partisans really don't do any favours for the open source/free software movement but as you say "Realists are good" surely in this context realists and pragmatists are one in the same, or at least a pragmatist is a type of realist.
Realists are good, but most pragmatists would sell all the progress we've made with Free software down the river in order to overtake the market leader. Thank $DEITY for fundamentalists to keep the balance.
Just my tuppence worth feel free to disagree. :-)
Cheers, BJ