[ Thanks to BeOpen
for this link. ]
“Listening to legendary Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld wax
about the beauties of the Open Source development community is a
bit like listening to an old Winterland-era hippie describe his
experiences after stumbling into an all-night rave.”
“Hertzfeld also uses the opportunity to play down one of the
main assumptions that helped generate the spring media flurry,
namely the notion that Hertzfeld and the Eazel development are
trying to put a Macintosh-style smiley face on the Linux operating
system. “We are trying to make Linux easier to use, but we’re not
trying to dumb it down,” he says. “We’re just giving [users] a
better way to comprenhend their system.”
“Still, lingering concerns within the hacker community that
GUIs represent a “dumbing down” of operating system functionality
are one of the primary reasons why Eazel has stepped to the
fore. Although projects such as GNOME and KDE have made huge
strides in making Linux as easy to use for the non-hacker, both
have been beholden to both external and internal developer demands
that versatility and customizability be built into every feature of
Linux.”