The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

ESR/CUPS feedback

Some of the comments are so spot on it's scary. OSS'ers take heed. This is what the world sees when they use Linux.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/luxury-part-deux.html

Krag
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Forgot to include the best quote of all.

"It's been twenty years since the GNU Manifesto and nearly seven since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think it's time we stopped congratulating ourselves quite so much on our dedication to freedom and our ability to write technically superior code, and began more often to ask "What are we doing to serve the real users?"

Krag
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Old news
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=119473

RocketJeff
Thursday, March 4, 2004

See Bruce Perens attempts (et al) to produce a sane distro that can be a mass market product.

http://www.userlinux.com

Simon Lucy
Thursday, March 4, 2004

This is ESR's follow up. The original thread was about the article itself. This is the feedback of the community.

Mike
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Oops, you're right Mike - sorry Krag, I feel like a real slashdotter by not fully reading before I responded...

ESR's followup was good and addressed some of the generic issues that were raised on the flame-fest that this topic produced on slashdot.

One of my favorite parts of this article was: "It doesn't matter whether the the failure of the browsing defaults in CUPS to match the documentation was a CUPS-team screwup or a Fedora screwup — Aunt Tillie doesn't care which direction that finger points, and I don't either."

ALso, even if you aren't an OSS person, his original rant and this followup are applicable to all developers. There are plenty of closed-source/Windows/etc developers guilty of the same things.

I think some of the worst examples of what he's talking about are never seen by the general public - it's a lot of the internal software written by businesses.

I'm getting tons of praise at my new job because the app I'm developing actually looks & functions like a real Windows application.

The previous developers coded apps that required arcane setup/usage rituals with options hardcoded in the programs and database fields reused without being renamed (which makes using the really bad report generator even worse). In addition, just about every error dialog is "An error happened, call MIS" (with a black letters on a bright purple background.

I'd love to trash all of the existing apps, but it looks like we'll be maintaing them for years until they can be replaced.

RocketJeff
Friday, March 5, 2004