Re: [tlug] YAST under the General Public License (GPL)

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 02:31:36PM +0900, Shawn wrote:

>So now that YAST (1) is open sourced, I wonder which distribution will 
>make use of it.  Debian perhaps?  Or isn't it the big deal that SuSE made 
>of it.

YAST is pretty good, but as a Debian user, I would be horrified if Debian
adopted it.  I would run away screaming to FreeBSD or Plan 9.  Debian is
not difficult to use, but the bar is appropriately set at a point where some
basic technical competence is in order.  A lot of stuff is done from the CLI
and there simply is no GUI tool.  This is as it should be. If Debian were made
easily accessible to the core target audience of the newbie-oriented distros,
that would, well, suck.  A key part of Linux has always been an emphasis on
having or getting technical competence.  Many people have said of Linux that
one of their attractions to it early on was that it put the fun back in computing.
Some distros have set as their target market people who do not think of anything
involving a CLI or really learning anything about computers as fun in any way.

There are distros whose target market is people who know nothing about computers
and don't want to know.  While I question the wisdom of pitching Linux to that
demographic at all (actually, there's no question.  It's insane), at least they
are keeping that demographic away from Debian, so I'll praise them that much.

There will doubtless be Debian-based distros that pitch to the low end of the
food chain, but Debian itself will probably always remain Debian.  At least, that
is to be hoped.  If Linux must become ubiquitous (I'd much rather see the
willfully ignorant buy Macs), there must remain distros where technical ability
is expected.  Source-based distros like Gentoo will fall into that category, and
one hopes that Debian and Slackware always will, too.

Jonathan
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