> ["About" menu item] > First time users go to them expecting to find out what > the program does, and instead they get the name of the author and remain > just as puzzled about what the program itself is for as they were > before. I hate them.
I see.. :) It has become a GUI idiom though, so most people probably know already what an "About" box is. > I want the same visibility of credits for reiserfs that movies give for > their actors. An interesting point. However, a movie goer is prepared for five minutes of credits with entertaining music in the background before 2 hours of the actual movie but a person running a disk utility will probably find it quite distracting to see a lot of stuff unrelated to the task at hand. What she appreciates, is information about the process. There are always quite a few programs involved in almost any task you make in Unix. If the kernel, disk driver, shell, sed, readline and disk utilities all wrote their credits while formatting a disk, the operating system would be nearly unusable. In that perspective, I hope you can understand why a Debian developer striving to put together a quality OS may consider it necessary to trim the output. A small amount of credits (perhaps pointing to a complete author list) is usually fine but if it's more than, say, 5 lines.. It's a balancing act between respecting the original work of the software authors and the wishes and needs of the users. What would you suggest as a solution? > I don't want the distro choosing how they are displayed > because some distros do things like create boot time splash screens that > tell about themselves instead of the authors, and so I have to say that > their track record demonstrates that they cannot be trusted with that > task. Mm.. I guess such splash screens are made mainly for two reasons: making their marketing easier and because novice users feel intimidated by screenfulls of text at startup. I agree that the first reason can be seen as a disrespectful act but the coin also has another side: compelling marketing of free operating systems helps giving them a wider audience, which is good for the distributed software, too. > If someone wants to create a boot program and/or screensaver that picks > a random OS component to describe the authors of at boot time, that > would be nicest of all. Yes, that's certainly a nice idea. (It would also mask the Linux driver's credits though, but at least they would get the same treatment as the rest of the system.) - Jarno
