Comment Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. (Score 1) 149
Now you've got me wondering if I'm actually thinking of twm. It all started so long ago... over half a lifetime ago... *LOL*
Now you've got me wondering if I'm actually thinking of twm. It all started so long ago... over half a lifetime ago... *LOL*
No, I mean trying to figure out how Motif/CDE did menus so I could customize them. Frustrating as hell before I got that working... no Googling for answers back then -- you had to actually RTFM, and the manuals sucked most horridly.
^^^ This.
Many FOSS projects are all about the fun of programming them, not about having a user base. Such projects get put "out there" in the hopes that someone might someday find them useful, but it doesn't really matter to the people working on them whether they ever have a substantial user base, as long as it continues to be fun to program and work on the project.
If user base was what counted to me, I'd have abandoned MSS Code Factory years ago. To this day I've never had more than 100 or so downloads in a week, and usually more like 10-20. But it's fun. It keeps me entertained. And that is what really "matters" to me; not it's popularity.
"Popularity breeds contempt."
You call it "Stockholm Syndrome"; I call it being "willing to learn".
Fully half of the things I see people complaining about over Gnome 3 have been fixed over the years. But they keep on bringing up bugs and issues that were with the
Being ignorant of something is forgiveable; it can be corrected through education. Remaining willfully ignorant about something by refusing to educate yourself is stupidity.
A "serious try" meant spending more than five minutes playing with it. It only took a day or two to get used to.
Many desktops, like Motif, took weeks to learn in comparison.
*shrug* Gnome 3 is different, but it isn't that bad if you take the time to learn how to work with it. I was frustrated with KDE 5 after many years of being a KDE advocate, so I gave Gnome 3 a serious try a few months ago and am now quite comfortable with it on my desktop. Contrary to the bleating of people who whine about it being "touch-oriented", I don't find it to be so at all.
But I'm not a "normal" desktop user. I've used so many desktop environments since the '80s, starting with the Amiga and Atari, that I really don't have much for specific expectations of "how a desktop should work." OS/2 Warp, Windows, Mac Classic, Motif, Sun's desktop, the environments provided by HP and IBM workstations, KDE, XFce, Gnome 2, Gnome 3... there really isn't much in common amongst them other than that they all had windows of some sort.
How do you "kill off" an open source project if the public is willing to take over the development and maintenance? Sure you may be continuing with a non-open-source branch of the code for your own products, but that doesn't stop anyone from working with the last released code base.
"Evil" is just a lot less subjective than "the right thing." The "right thing" for what reasons? What motives? Whose benefit?
Evil, on the other hand, is a much clearer term in most people's minds.
I want an update for my old SNES. Just because.
Remember when things were sold "as is" and there was no such thing as an "update"?
I'm sure Hitler thought he was "doing the right thing."
Welcome to the Stazi States of America. All your possessions are belong to us.
People say Stallman is nuts for rabidly endorsing the GPL, but he doesn't hold a candle to the Slashbots who insist that they should get anything and everything for free for all eternity.
Remembering what Microsoft did to stop Lotus and WordPerfect from running on their platforms, it seems kind of fitting that they should be getting shafted by an Apple update now.
My nieces and nephew from two of my sisters have had a variety of vegetables with every meal since they were infants, and they all love them (sometimes in preference to the main course.) My other nephew, on the other hand, was fed more starch and meat while young, and avoids vegetables like the plague.
I firmly believe that whether a kid will eat their vegetables has a lot more to do with what kind of foods they eat in their very young days than it has to do with what is served in a school cafeteria. Many kids, especially those in poorer neighbourhoods, rarely see fresh vegetables. They're "foreign foods" to them, so they instinctively "hate" them.
The US isn't going to be the only nation making claims, so you're dreaming if you think the US legal bill would be paid above and before every other nation's. There are a lot of seriously pissed off people, organizations, and governments out there getting in line.
Real Users never use the Help key.