On Tue, 11 Jan 2000 16:04:52 GMT, root wrote:

> OK. But that's not all. Read to the end, then kick me, OK? :)
> Here's what I'm afraid of. Currently IB community is an elite of a kind. We
>all know the basics, we all work hard to keep ourselves trained and educated.
>To me, sine qua non elite is an ability and a will to learn. Do we want to let
>everyone in? As long as our community is small we can keep all products based
>on IB on a high quality level by sharing experience with others and providing
>our colleagues with help and advice. Can you imagine answering hundreds of
>kiddies what it the 3rd normal form and why one might want triggers or SP
>that return result set? Doing that daily? For long months?

It's a good fear to have, but I think it's wrong.....
Have you read the paper called "the cathedral and the bazaar" ?
It's on open-source development and a large and important part is set aside for the Users! of the software and the kiddies..............
Which would be IMHO sorta power-users.............

It isn't the quality of programming alone which makes open-source so succesfull it's the speed with which bugs are tracked down....
Often it's harder to track a bug and deliver a meaningfull bugreport on it than it is to correct it.

Several key-figures in the opensource world have testified to this..... (linus Torvalds for example)

BTW I still consider myself to be one of the kiddies although I know what a 3NF is............
Have you considered that the kiddies might be doing exactly the same thing in which you take pride:
">To me, sine qua non elite is an ability and a will to learn."

What else would spark the desire in a human mind to ask what a 3NF is :-)

As far a stupid questions..... there is always Read The Fucking Manual isn't there........

> IMHO, this is why Linux can't conquer home user market. People don't want to
>study it, they just want doing things. This can be good or bad for home user,
>but this is an absolutely inacceptable attitude of a developer.
> More on that. End users sitting 9-17 in their cubicles don't see database
>server. They work with applications. And the quality of these applications has
>a great impact on DBMS reputation. `Oh, you know, last week they switched our
>dept to some new database, what was its name, something in between.... oh, yea,
>InterStore, wait, InterBase, yes. And you know what? This is a nightmare, I
>must tell. Alll my buttons gone, I had neat boxes and those lil stripes, what,
>they aren't there, man! As tell you, this open software is for geeks, a 4 am
>fun, not for serious business people, yes.... And, oh boy, I'm giong to
>complain about it, yes!'

How about giving them a serious way to make such a complaint, they are your users......
Perhaps they would start to respond a lot different if they got the feeling they are involved in the changes that are made
to their direct work-enviroment...... And if you helped them in formulating these complaint into something usefull for yourself as a developer
you might get the most formidable bugtracking force in software-development....... think about it...

Take care
Ramon

BTW cathedral-bazaar paper can be found on this site
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/