LinuxToday.com.au: Is Hacker Culture a Help or Hindrance?

“…There’s little question that the hacker culture is positive
in so many ways. But there are fringe areas where hackerdom may be
doing real harm to Linux in particular and open source in
general.”

“Take, for example, the hacker-centric way some software is
distributed. Installing packaged software is a breeze, when you can
get it. Often you have no choice but to work with the source.
Compiling source code can be straightforward, but often it
isn’t.”

“Problems generally arise because developers make certain
assumptions about the system and the person doing the compiling. In
some cases the assumptions are simply wrong, but more to the point
they are often hacker-centric. Some install instructions might
be written in Serbo-Croat for all the sense they make to
non-programmers. And how many times have you been flummoxed half
way through a MAKE because an obscure header file is located in the
wrong directory? Fixing the problem might be trivial to a
programmer, but not for the rest of us.”

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