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Our Blogs Open Sauce Linux: understanding it takes time
Our Blogs Open Sauce Linux: understanding it takes time | Linux: understanding it takes time |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 21 September 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 7. When you install the product and try to use it, you strike unexpected problems. You also find some nice surprises, which boosts your flagging enthusiasm a little. Featured Whitepaper
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8. When you ask the product's maker for help, he suggests you talk to other users. They welcome you with open arms but answer your questions in a strange language. No-one ever writes to the head of a FOSS project asking for help - are we looking at a corporate entity here or a small project? It isn't clear. 9. When you admit that you have trouble understanding their language, you're told you'd better learn it, or you won't appreciate the product. Is there something peculiar about this? I mean when you drank wine for the first time did you go ga-ga over it? No, you need to acquire a taste for the beverage. The same applies to anything you try out. 10. When you tell the designers that their product isn't marketable in its present form, they say that's okay, since they only wrote it to share with their friends. Ah, here the marketing droid emerges. Why would someone who's experimenting with an operating system care about marketing? 11. As you wonder what to make of it all, you watch the designers and their supporters squabble among themselves over all kinds of trivia. As you realize that their collective focus isn't on fighting their real competitors, what's left of your enthusiasm ebbs further away. Why do we use operating systems? Is it because the company/project that makes the OS lives in a state of perpetual harmony? Or is it because it suits us to use the system? 12. When you ask the people in charge why they don't show more leadership, they say they have no power to unite the squabbling communities. They add that disagreement and vigorous debate were the very fires that forged the great product in the first place. Marketers who love the word "consensus" will never understand how change comes about. All this breed needs is a one-size-fits-all slick product - and it doesn't matter if it's the equivalent of coals in Newcastle. 13. When you discover that some of the designers have made deals with their biggest competitor, the last drop of your enthusiasm drains away. Hardly. For every SUSE user who moved to some other distribution, there are two who stayed with the product. People who can understand things from one perspective - that of marketing alone - only reveal their inability to comprehend something like Linux. Consider this: if marketing people could understand Linux, then Microsoft would have had the measure of it by now - Microsoft, remember, is a marketing company first. Its claims to being a technology company are a distant second. |
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