Hello Gurudatta, I'll curb my basic instinct to blast and try and answer this mail in simple terms which hopefully you would be able to understand with some effort.
--- Gurudatta Raut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Now that many of U have spent vast good parts of > your life in linux, and linux being so free open & > liberae (I am not giving up even though its not), I > want to know where the hell is that website where all > users of linux can vote for and put their most wanted > linux features and most dispected linux features lists > ? When you install Linux, what you get is: a) The GNU/linux kernel b) A selection of packages that the distributor of the linux distribution decided to include with the help of the community that supports the distribution. Often a choice is made to choose one package over another similar package. (For example: xine instead of mplayer). For each of these packages, the best suitable default configurations that is decided, again with the guidance of community opinion. Now, each of these packages themselves have a number of contributors that collectively decide the evolution of the package. This is like a democracy. Think of a disto as a political party, the packages as the pet-projects (or issues) that political parties commit themselves to. Now, coming to answer your question: how does one influence decisions or bring about change ? There are different approaches: a) The easiest is to vote for the party whose philosophy or agenda is most closely aligned with yours. This translates to "Choosing the distro you feel most comfortable with". If you go this way, the effort is minimum (you just have to make a choice), but the trade-off is you have to accept the shortcomings of your choice with the benefits. b) Get actively involved with the functioning of the political party. This translates to "Get involved with the community supporting your distribution". For Fedora go here: http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/ For Mandriva go here: http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/RpmsFarm/VotingBooth For Debian go here: http://www.debian.org/devel/join/ c) Get actively involved with a community that are involved in issues themselves, instead of relying on the political party to address the issues correctly. This translates to - "Get involved with the community supporting a particular package". For Mozilla/FireFox/Thunderbird this is at http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/ For OpenOffice it is http://contributing.openoffice.org/index.html For the linux kernel itself it is: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html Now, no matter which route from the above you choose to bring about change, any one of them is immensely more preferable and effective than shouting out "The whole system sucks !!" (this applies to both political ideals as well as the linux community). I understand that after being used to a communist/dictatorship regime, where one sole body (company or party) is responsible for everything, the democracy of linux is quite a shock, but take some responsibility and behave maturely and you will notice the advantages. In conclusion, my only hope is that this mail clears up some issues for a wider audience than just Gurudatta, since I'd be pained to realize that I spent almost 45 mins hitting my head against a brick wall. > If U r a linux lover U wont ignore this question, its > your moral obligatory duty to address this issue and > solve it. Speaking about morals, I'm still waiting for the thanks and apology[1]. I dare you to muster enough strength of character to do it. HTH Regards Steve [1] http://plug.org.in/pipermail/plug-mail/2005-August/016229.html ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: (plug-mail@plug.org.in) List Information: http://plug.org.in/mailing-list/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
