Subject: Re: source access vs dynamism From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/05 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3145549464213301@naggum.no> * David Thornley | It never seemed to me to be more hackable than, say, TRS-DOS (I have no | personal experience with the Apple OSes of the day). It was more hacked, | because it was more prevalent. You're reversing cause and effect. I didn't say MORE hackable, I said its hackability. sigh. I'm saying that MS-DOS would not have become a winner in the market if it had been unhackable and people couldn't add fairly basic stuff to it and learn more about it -- it's the same argument people make about free software, for crying out loud! if you don't think it mattered for MS-DOS, you should explain why the exact same thing is _the_ defining property of the success of free software in some people's mind. initial deployment may well have been because of the "IBM" brand, but how many other products have had the "IBM" brand and _not_ become widely popular? the efforts to explain the normal life of an IBM product fail utterly when that product became a NON-IBM product. I have to wonder, am I the only person left on this planet who remembers the computer magazines of the '80s? | Not quite at first, IIRC. I believe IBM would sell one of three OSes | with the early PCs: PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and the p-system. MS-DOS was | shipped as PC-DOS and was the default. there _was_ no MS-DOS at the start. PC-DOS was a relabeling of QD-DOS (Quick and Dirty DOS) made by one of Bill Gates' early victims, and very little else. it was basically a port of CP/M to the 8086 without the stupid incompatibilities that cost Digital Research their market position. | If you don't like Microsoft, then you really should think about how much | you want software companies to care about the bottom line. your decision to give Microsoft and Bill Gates your full moral support is not a necessary consequent of caring about the bottom line. I suggest you think about how caring about ethics and legal business practices is not necessarily the detriment to success that it would have been if Microsoft had cared about them. I also don't think drug czars, pimps, extortionists, and porn makers are good models of how to make money, but there's no doubt that in each of these categories of "business", the bottom line is very well cared for. in case you haven't noticed, Bill Gates is actually defrauding people. most people who engage in fraud will make big money for a while -- if they had been utter, complete, and immediate failures, there would have been no incentive to make laws against fraud. | >> the mass market is _not_ the only market. the only thing we can say for | >> sure in this business about those who believe that is that Bill Gates | >> profits even more by having as many people disregard every other market. | And why do they disregard every other market? I was talking about people who claim Bill Gates is next to God, not the people who buy his crapware, because they _are_ his market. it's the people who argue _against_ creating software for something _other_ than the mass-market that Bill Gates controls that I'm interested in. | There have always been different operating systems and languages | available, if you knew what you were doing and what you wanted. For the | individual purchaser, gaining the knowledge was generally a bad move. | The result is that the market is dominated by people who really don't | know what they're doing, and this is a bad thing in general. | Unfortunate, but I don't have a fix for it. this is a twist on the old "but what can one man do?" argument, and it is just as invalid. each man can do exactly what he wants. conforming to the masses is a _choice_, and any other choice may be made. the fix is therefore very simple: change your own ways, then change that of one more guy. publicize your choice, understand what people base their decisions on, then do something that makes a few people notice. you can't change the minds of millions of people at once, you have to change a few minds at a time, starting with yourself. if you deny that that option exists, there is no fix for any problem at all, from _your_ perspective, that is. #:Erik -- save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers