Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 08:14:08 -0000
On 9 Dec 2003 at 6:10, august wrote:
If you think commercial capital is incentive to do things faster, I
would ask you then, what's the rush?
It's nothing to do with getting it done faster. It's about getting
people to do the same thing.
Volunteer projects need a core of about four to six lead programmers
to agree on a direction and steer it the right way. Agreement is easy
when it's an obvious step forwards.
The more innovative and radical the step forwards, the less chance
for agreement. And therefore, volunteer based production is
inherently conservative and tends towards conformity. Hence why Linux
clones other systems rather than ever doing anything new.
Now if you can pay people you can pay a group to do a job whether
they think it's a good idea or not. *That's* why capital injection is
necessary for step-change innovation - it creates coherence.
I think commercial intersts are inherently very populist (in a bad
way) and un-innovative. If you analyse the UI of the two popular
operating systems, you can see that it makes very base assumptions
about its users.
About the sole step-change innovative thing Microsoft ever has done
was to make software a mass market commodity. By making Office and
Windows like they did, they have become the world's richest company.
I also suspect that the NT kernel is step-change innovative - the DDK
certainly suggests it. However, it's hard to be sure.
Cheers,
Niall
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/