[Sheflug] Bloatware (was Re: NHS privatisation + IT)

[Alastair Donlon <nospam [at] netsoc.ucd.ie>]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 11:21:52AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Alastair" == Alastair Donlon <adonlon [at] netsoc.ucd.ie> writes:
> 
>     Alastair> In particular, this is important for third world
>     Alastair> countries,schools and cash stgrapped countries. Second
>     Alastair> hand machines are worth practically nothing, because
>     Alastair> Mr. Gates et al. have forced everybody into a two year
>     Alastair> upgrade cycle by producing bloated software that will
>     Alastair> only run on machines with a 1Thz processor and 4 billion
>     Alastair> GBytes of RAM. We don't need to follow his lead.
> 
> But that's exactly rms's point of principle.  Anybody can unbloat the
> software because the source is open.

True. However, the practicalities of producing free software are
not always as simple as rms makes out. Any program that starts out
bloated and/or porrly designed is in a bad position to start off with.
Bloated code is large and difficult to understand. When a user wishes
to modify some piece of code, some of the factors which is going to
influence whether he/she will make the modification is going to be
how easy the code is to understand, how many changes have to be made
and just how much effort is going to be involved. Particularly badly
written software may need a complete redesign just to make a simple
modification - a notion most people would balk at I'm sure.

I'm not really trying to make this a free/non-free thing. I'm trying
to talk about bloat/non-bloat. Bloated software is bad, no matter
whether your software is free or not. It's a software engineering
issue.

> 
> It's that there's no effective demand.  Third world countries?  Most
> of them tax charity hardware at the border at list price plus bribe.
> But for the Ministers, nothing less than the latest Intel paperweight
> is allowed on their desks.  Schools?  Real computing scares the
> instructors, let alone the schoolmasters, into browning their panties.
> Keep those things out of here!  Give Etch-a-Sketch in 32-bit graphics-
> accelerated color!  Cash strapped?  Poland recently handed a few
> companies a tax bill for "charitable receipts" when they downloaded
> Debian, using the price of "comparable" MSFT software to establish
> value.
> 

Fair point, but just because there are a few rotten apples, it
doesn't mean that the whole barrel is spoilt. I'm sure there are
plenty of third world countries where corruption isn't endemic or,
at least, no more so than in most first world countries. As far as
most post-communist countries goes, I've always felt that Poland
was the least 'westernised' (in the moving away from a communist
style government/economy). 

Most importantly, if the option isn't given then it can't be taken
up. 

As for schools. In my school, and in many of the schools my friends
went to, there was at least 1 teacher who managed to get one or
two decent machines and who actually cared about their use and
management. Ok, sure, getting stuff into schools isn't necessarily
easy and you have to talk to the right people who'll help you
soft soap it past the management, but isn't that they way with
anything?


>     Alastair> What we need is a _distinct_ speed/memory/diskspace
>     Alastair> advantage over Winblows apps to make a significant
>     Alastair> difference in the world.
> 
> We've got that.  That's why Apache and Emacs/vi and TeX have such
> large shares of their respective markets.  No?

Precisely. The only problem with them is that their user interface
tends to scare people. And understandably so. I remember learning
vi, and I still have the scars from my early days with TeX. What
they could do with is a good user interface, for the general public,
to make them more easily accessible. A gentler learning curve is
going to attract more people, at least some of whom will want to
get to the power lying underneath and who'll go on to learn the
base tool.

Speaking of user interfaces to TeX, has anybody used LyX recently?
I haven't looked at it in a coon's age, and would be interested in
hearing if it's improved at all.

> 
> People like knowing that their HTML is an impenetrable mess.  They
> feel like they've got their money's worth when they look at the "HTML"
> output from MS Wart.  The output from PSGML doesn't feel very good: "I
> could write _that_ by hand, what am I paying for!"

I have to disagree here. Very few people (i.e. management types, who
control the pursestrings) look at the underlying representation. Most
of them don't even know that HTML files are stored as text, or that
HTML has got something to do with the web (or internet, as they call
it).

> 
> As usually, you need to fix the people before you can give them
> appropriate technology.
> 

"Everybody's crazy except thee and me, and I'm not so sure about thee
anymore." I don't think that people need to be 'fixed', they just need
to be given the experience of superior applications. Very few people
are ever given the chance to leave the cozy environs of MSOffice, or
else the alternatives always make them want to shrink back to the
devil they know rather than the one they don't.

A.D.

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