Subject: Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 17:57:40 EDT

On various points.
UNIX has been around forever, and for desktops for fairly long, but by and 
large the emphasis here seems to be on the Linux realization, which is about 
10 years old (it seems to be hard to pin down a date) against Windows at a 
full 20 years 9reading off the copyright notices). 
I'm glad to hear that Linux is growing rapidly and that Buicks are outselling 
Olds -- with a fleet almost catching up to a single model of Toyota in a 
single color. And that it is readily available in the sense that there are 
lots of places where you can buy it and things that work with it. It does 
not yet come bundled even at places that sell it and it does not yet work out 
of the box -- if the instruction booklet that was included in the last box I 
looked into is a guide: 20 pages on fitting it to the machine, involving 
parts of the critter I don't even want to know about theoretically, let alone 
hands-on. Ditto for most of the software, which then is not nearly so pretty 
as boring old Word, for example. But that will all pass as it succeeds, if 
it is indeed basically a better thing. 
Meanwhile, most people still have MS and that is going to continue for quite 
a while. So live with it and help them along as well as improving Linux (or 
the UNIX of your choice or something else, for that matter).
I'm not sure just how Lojban is to emulate Linux's success. We are 
apresumably already trying to build the best language we can within our 
guidelines. It does not seem that putting down other languages is going to 
be particularly helpful and cooperating with them on common problems might 
actually be to our advantage from time to time.
The intricacies of the Free Software movement seem a bit off the point here 
right now, noble as it is in itself. We are interested in getting things 
that help Lojban, by whatever means we can and of maximim effectiveness. 
That means things that run on Windows and MSDOS and Macs and Linux and -- if 
the need arose -- CPMs and supercomputers. And doing it without disparaging 
remarks or nasty cracks.