Re: On Compatibility

[Michal Suchanek]

On 10/25/05, Alfred M. Szmidt <address@hidden> wrote:
>    I work in a building with over 200 people.
>
> My univ. is a building with aprox 1000 people, exlcuding students.
> All use Emacs.
>
>    That's why every major computer dealer bundles some Office suite
>    with their computers.  That's why MS produces Office.
>
> I fail to see what non-free software has to do with anything.

It is accidentally the best software available so far that serves
certain class of users. This class of users is accidentally far the
largest these days. Probably more than half of *all* computer users.

>
>    It's a HUGE cash cow.  That's why the whole OASIS OpenDoc thing is
>    such a big deal too.
>
> No, it isn't, the reason why it is a huge deal is because of freedom.
>
>    As far as multi-user systems, they generally operate as servers.
>    There are a few places where people still use dumb terminals with a
>    VT-100 intepreter for everything, but every office in every country
>    I've done work in uses PC's connected to file and print servers.
>
> Every _big_ building uses something akin to a dumb terminal (usual
> crap like SunRay's or what not that can handle X sessions remotley)
> since maintaining 300 something PC's is a nightmare.

It's not nice. I can tell from experience. But it is manageable. The
PCs run MS windows. There is a fileserver where users data and
settings are stored. When a PC breaks, you take another one, copy the
system from an image, and you get a replacement.
Now if NFS was not such a crap you could run GNU/Linux on the PCs and
NFS-mount the binaries and home directories. No need to even install
anything. Oh well. Maybe AFS-mount? The PCs in Unix lab tend to crash
only occasionally now. Perhaps it is becoming stable. But setting up
AFS does not sound exceptionally easy. For some reason they do not
AFS-mount the binaries. I wonder why.
And last but not least you can get a terminal server. Either MS or
GNU/Linux. The latter being still sort of experimental. But aside from
some local problems (the administrative insists on communicating in MS
Office formats) the solutions should both work.
>
>    As far as "installed by default", if it's not, then the average
>    user won't use it.
>
> FireFox isn't installed by default, for some odd reason a lot of
> people use it...  Which contradicts your statement quite badly.

Well, it has some features that make it much more useful than any
other web browser, for large number of people.

However, you cannot tell the same about Emacs vs MS Office or OpenOffice.
I guess that there is the same tradeoff as with most other terminal
applications: Emacs is easier to use but harder to learn (and most
people who use computers prefer software that is easy to learn). Plus
you need some additional tools for print-formatting and
print-previewing to use Emacs to make printed documents.
And writing texts that include images is very hard in software that
does not support graphics.

Emacs does not even provide (afaik - but it is not the kitchen sink -
so who knows) anything like spreadsheet. That thingy with cells is
widely used for some reason.
>
>    I've got plenty of real-life examples of average computer users
>    that I deal with every single day.  It's an eye-opening experience.
>
> So have I.

So they write their text in whatever has been preinstalled on their
system. Be it Emacs, MS Office, OpenOffice, Abiword, or anything else.


Anyway, you can implement the terminal interface for these programs
quite easily. There are many terminal emulators for X using various
toolkits and emulation libraries. All the  OS has to provide is  a
pipe that supports a few ioctls that make it look like a terminal.
That does not sound too hard to me.   And there is Xemacs, gvim, etc.

Thanks

Michal Suchanek


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