> -----Original Message----- > From: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Duncan > Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 5:21 PM > To: gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org > Subject: [gentoo-amd64] Re: How To Play WMV (thread drift -slaveryware) > > > "Bob Young" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted > [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on > Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:01:19 -0700: > > > When was the last time that you personally submitted a *patch* for some > > open source app/utility/driver? > > Matter of fact, altho I don't claim to do C or C++, I do do a bit of > scripting, and have submitted several ebuild and initscripts patches this > year. =8^)
Good for you, I honestly mean that, that's a very good thing. > Of course, I'm not "most people" nor would I /want/ to be, but certainly, > understanding scripting isn't /too/ hard, and most Gentoo users in any > case should be able to do it and thus post patches at that level with > little difficulty. Again though, "most Gentoo users" do tend to still be a > cut above "most Linux users", technical literacy wise. Still, bash > scripting is something anyone that can decently manage his own system > should be able to do if they choose to, and the fact that nearly all Linux > systems use shell scripting for their init sequence demonstrably leaves > them freer, more open to users, than the comparatively opaque boot process > of many closed source systems out there. (I know, this is one thing I > immediately appreciated about Linux when switching from MS, and taking > apart and reassembling the Mandrake initscripts is how I actually learned > my bash scripting.) Since adopting Linux as my secondary OS, I've learned a lot of bash scripting, and I've chosen to dig pretty deep in to perl, so that I could create an app for extracting and archiving packets from a TCP/IP stream that meet a specified criteria. That being said, way less than 5 percent of the population has even the slightest bit of interest in learning the things that you and I have chosen to dig in to, it's just not their thing. They are more interested in gymnastics, or skiing, or scuba diving, or directing movies, or counseling drug abusers, or feeding the hungry, or any one of thousands of other things. They are *never* *ever* going to be interested in learning bash programming, no matter how easy or "fun" you tell them it is, and that's perfectly okay, and that's as it should be. Those people are no less "free" for using CSS, and the fact is, that "those people" are the vast majority of the population. -- Regards Bob Young -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
