oscar.hellstrom.st :: weblog

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote an article on why the average computer user does not run away from expensive OS to a free one, (mainly Windows to Linux, but there would be alternatives in both ends) and what the “Linux Community” does not understand. I’m quite sure that this is not a problem of understanding what the average computer user wants, but rather what the Linux hackers wants. I myself do not really care if the world’s computer users would run Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X or whatnot. As long as the hacker community can have a nice OS to play around with it will do that. This is a fundamental part of what drives the community, even though “the market” does help. Linux came to exist when a Finnish guy wanted to learn more about his 386 processor (and he was fed up with MINIX). He spent a considerable time in his room hacking… and why? well not to get the world to use his operating system. Most OSS project (that is not started by the so called open source corporations) are created because someone is fed up with the current state of some software, or because someone is curious how to make things better, or even if it is possible to do it yourself rather then using what others have done.

Kingsley-Hughes writes that there are too many distributions and that this is a problem for the average user since he or she cannot just choose to install Linux. Well, this shows another interesting point of the “Linux Community” (or actually what they call the “Open Source Community”). It shows that there is not one community. Every one who is in to software and is in to sharing what he or she has accomplished is not automatically part of a community. There are a lot of individuals writing software, and if they don’t like the way it’s done today, they’ll change it. Since there are usually others who want to change things, some changes ore done in collaboration, and creates a new product. No one really cares if this confuses Mr. Anderson over in Texas.

I don’t really have fire crucial things that the average computer user could come to understand about the Linux community, but I think this one is enough. We build software because we like it, not to attract the worlds computer users. Some projects even want to scare the average user away. There are several programs you need to change the actual source to configure. The choice for this is of course not to enable anyone to learn a bit of programming. So at the end of the day, the average hacker don’t care about the average user.

Last summer I and some other folks from ETC participated in the ICPF Programming Contest. Even though our result wasn’t the greatest, we still had a lot of fun during that weekend. This year I’m already looking forward to the contest and will probably participate with some people form ETC again. Everyone who is interested in reading some information about organising the contest would find the contest’s chairman, Johan Jeuring’s blog very interesting.

Taggedmail.com claims to be

a premier social networking destination and an ideal place for advertisers to reach their target audience.

This nice explanation of their service does however fit quite well with what my impression of the site is, they’re harvesting emails for what they call advertising… which would be Spam according to me. I’ve now received several email from this “service” and I’m quite sure that it is some email harvesting system. The first two email’s seemed legit, since they included proper names in the title, such as “Maria has tagged you”. I was however suspicious, since I don’t really know any Maria that well. The last four of them have however been from names such as “TackTackTack” (Would be ThankThanksThanks in English), and the actual website does not exactly give an impression of a usable online community/forum. My normal take on these unknown sites who wants you to sign up and give them e-mail addresses of you friends is to ignore them. Well I usually try to not confirm my email to any spam systems anyway.