Strategy (was Re: Improving copyright)

João Miguel Neves joao at silvaneves.org
Thu May 13 21:55:29 UTC 2004


A Qui, 2004-05-13 às 21:39, Niall Douglas escreveu:
> On 13 May 2004 at 19:14, João Miguel Neves wrote:
> 
> > > Projects such as ReactOS should be getting the very fullest of
> > > weight from the FSF, not Linux [1]. I don't know why people have
> > > missed this very self-evident point.
> > > 
> > I completely disagree with you. ReactOS is a project that is condemned
> > to guess all the mistakes MS did. 
> 
> What mistakes? Windows NT was designed by one of the most famous & 
> respected operating system designers the world has ever known. It has 
> a superb kernel. While it has a few structural mistakes, it has far 
> fewer than say the 2.4 series Linux kernels [1] and remember it was 
> designed long before Linux.
> 
You completely misunderstood me. Any program with a thousand of lines
has hundreds of little choices that were made by it's programmers. A
clone like ReactOS has to get all those right. It's that task that I
think it's mad.

> >I really prefer projects like GNUWin
> > that allow you to present Free Software to windows users and then
> > change to a Free Software system.
> 
> If it can't run unmodified Windows binaries natively it's pointless. 
> The thing stopping most home users is games compatibility and while 
> WINE is excellent, it's not good right there.
> 
I don't think that running windows binaries is going to be an issue in
less than one decade, probably 3 to 5 years.

> > BTW shoes are made for an european foot because most of shoe buyers
> > have european feet.
> 
> No, it's because those of European descent have the most buying power 
> - therefore industrial production is orientated primarily around 
> them. As a proportion of total would-be shoe buyers European feet are 
> a small minority.
> 
So, you just said "No" but your justification said "Yes". I said buyers
on purpose, not people.

> If the self-proclaimed leaders of the free software philosophy really 
> wanted to maximise its spread, pushing a system incompatible with 
> >85% of all systems & programmers out there is not the way to do it. 
> Far better clone that system [2] and beat the devil at his own game.
> 
No, running in second place by following the person that goes first is
not beating "the devil at his own game". It's making sure you're always
behind the first guy. Our resources are better spent on platforms that
have shown themselves stable enough over the years that don't force us
to reimplement our programs every 3 years.

-- 
						João Miguel Neves


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