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Re: Emacs discussed on US NPR


From: ken
Subject: Re: Emacs discussed on US NPR
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 07:29:46 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.6.0

On 05/28/2015 03:11 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
Yesterday (5-28-15) I was listening to a NPR - John Hockenberry -
"The Takeaway" session and starting about 45 minutes after the hour
is a discussion which begins with emacs and then  progresses to open
source software in general.

[ Sorry, no headphones to listen to the talk here.  ]
Does it talk about Free Software as well?


         Stefan

They didn't really nail down the concept of FOSS, but just sort of contrasted "slow" software (e.g., Emacs) with commercial software, e.g., Word.

It was more a touchy-feeling kind of talk, hit me like a woman talking about the joys of growing her own flax and with that making her own dresses and how she's more comfortable and satisfied in that than buying something off the shelf. Characterizing emacs (and other FOSS) as "slow" didn't however, I think, do us any favors. I'm sure a lot of people are going to miss the meaning and think, "I want *fast* software. Why would anybody want *slow* software!?"

If the overall point could have been made better and with clearly unambiguous terms, it would have been much better. Just last week on another (non-technical) list someone asked, 'What software should I use for organizing my taxes?' She didn't say what OS she was using and I was pretty sure she was looking for a GUI app. I wanted to tell her that she could accomplish that just by using a sensible directory structure and meaningful filenames, but I didn't bother. I've already tried several times on that list to recommend _easy_ FOSS solutions, but people these days always want to buy an app or rent a service for every need they have and it's impossible to convince them otherwise. Indeed, a few years ago my boss, a young MBA, karate-chop guy, was looking for an app to create a network connection once a day between a Unix machine in one city and a linux box in our server room. I told him that capability was already built into the OSs. He'd read an article which convinced him the app needed to do de-duplication (copy the files to be transferred to another drive first). I said we could do that in-house too. Then he said he wanted _support_ for the "app". At that point I gave up. You can give a thirsty clown a glass of cool water, but if he won't take off his big, red nose, he won't be able to drink it.



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