Verily I say unto thee, that Attila spake thusly:
> Your reply confused me. Of the quotes you give only the 1st is mine.
Sorry, I misread the attribution.
> Regarding the "Ubuntu way", you may want to read the Ubuntu NG and
> there is a definite slant in that direction (by no means unanimous).
> For example, if a discussion starts about the -dev packages required
> for compiling something, a respons would be "why do you want to
> compile when you can just install the package". Attempting to diss
> Skype on the Ubuntu NG will get you flamed, etc.
Ah, you were talking about the /attitude/.
> I am happy that Ubuntu exists but they do seem to have an attitude
> problem that is not general in the Linux world. This is not
> surprising coming from a group that uses "Linux for Humans" as its
> slogan.
I'm part of a group of people trying to change that attitude with the
Gobuntu project, the whole purpose of which is an attempt to reverse
Ubuntu's downward slide towards proprietary dependence. I've witnessed
first hand how stubbornly some of these people resist that change. Some
of the arguments regarding what they think does or doesn't constitute
"Free", for example, are quite revealing of their rather indoctrinated
attitude.
Ubuntu provides the means to rebuild packages for those who want to. The
fact that a huge proportion of Ubuntu users are noobs, who baulk at that
prospect, does not change the fact that this is an essential freedom,
that /empowers/ those users who /choose/ to use that freedom.
But it is by no means a /necessity/ in order to simply /use/ the distro.
Certainly it is no more of a necessity than the "need" for updated
proprietary software on proprietary platforms. Using that as an example
of "what's wrong with Linux" is just hypocrisy, especially when many of
those people denounce the "need" to rebuild packages in one breath, but
then praise proprietary packages (which they can /never/ rebuild due to
lack of sources, no matter how much they might "need" to) in the next.
Years ago I paid for a Windows application called Linkman, which was a
browser bookmark organiser, IMHO the best of its kind ever made. Some
time later Firefox was released, but Linkman was never updated to
integrate with Firefox the way it did with IE. Users begged on the
forums for /years/, for an update to implement that feature, but it
never came, and indeed the author stopped participating in the forums,
and eventually just shut them down, rather than listen to his customers.
Years later, the author /did/ finally release an update, but not before
he'd lost the support of his customers, who abandoned him as readily as
he had abandoned them. How many of those people would still be using
Linkman if it had been an Open Source project which could be rebuilt by
the /users/ to incorporate the features /they/ wanted?
So it never ceases to amaze me how some people continue to use the
"rebuilding from source is difficult" argument as an excuse to attack
GNU/Linux, presenting the false dichotomy that it is /both/ necessary
and difficult on the one hand, but proprietary software has the
"benefit" of denying users access to the source on the other hand, which
is presumably what makes it so "easy".
It is almost as if these people are complaining that they have too much
freedom. It makes no sense at all. It kind of reminds me of the "choice
is bad" nonsense spouted by some of the idiot Trolls in this group,
notably Hardon Quirk (who I note with interest also claims to be an
Ubuntu user).
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
| make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
| - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
16:13:35 up 69 days, 15:08, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00
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