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[zman <zman AT gibbon.kungfumonkey.com>]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Ilan Volow wrote:
> I think the fact that some people in the Open Source community 
> associate an environment where absolutely everything is done 
> graphically with proprietaryness speaks volumes about why the current 
> offering of open source UI's suck.

Sorry I'm not a member of the Open Source community, though I do use a lot 
of their software on the server side, far more often because it is better 
than any cost consideration. And I do a GUI quite often, hell I use 
webmin.

>  From what I've seen, if an OS supports a command line, the 
> command-line-thinking without fail finds a way to leak into the GUI. 
> Saying that the command line isn't a bad thing is like saying a site 
> for radioactive waste isn't a bad thing (it does create jobs, after 
> all). People tell you "no, no. It'll never leak out. It's buried under 
> an entire mountain of stuff. There's no chance of it polluting 
> anything". And then five years later everyone in the valley around the 
> mountain starts getting weird cancers and people catch three-eyed fish. 
> Or in the case of operating systems, you find a hell of a lot of GUI 
> apps sprouting system-oriented jargon or all-lower case executable 
> names with dashes in the middle like foo-install-tool.

I guess you never look under the hood of your car either. There are plenty 
of times even on a workstation that the CLI is the fastest, easiest, and 
most efficient way to get the job done. If you can't see this then you are 
blind to useability in its most base form. It sounds as if you are saying 
there should be no CLI at all. That an OS should be form over function. 
That I should have my right to CLI taken away. Not unless you can pry it 
out of my cold dead hands. My friends we have here a prejudice against the 
CLI. What's the matter can't understand it?

-- 
Scott H. Zekanis
zman AT kungfumonkey.com
http://www.rod-o-rama.com
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