Path: boulder!agate!ames!data.nas.nasa.gov!data!gumby
   From: gumby@Cygnus.COM (David V. Henkel-Wallace)
   References: <EJH.92Nov18111609@khonshu.colorado.edu>
   Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov (News Administrator)
   Organization: Cygnus Support, Palo Alto, California
   Date: 21 Nov 92 07:40:49
   Lines: 32

      Date: 18 Nov 92 11:16:09
      From: ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett)

				But it's just a crying shame to have all
      these free great packages that, with just a few minutes help from an
      expert, could be accessible, and not be able to use them. Am I the
      only one who feels this way?

   The software may be free, but there's no free lunch.  Here's an
   interesting quote from Cringely's Accidental Empires:

      "Typical WordPerfect customers make two [support] calls, averaging
       five minutes each, which means that when the founders of a
       five-person software start-up dream about selling 100,000 copies
       of their new application they are also dreaming (though usually
       they dont know it) spending at least 8.3 man-years on the
       telephone answering the same questions over and over again."

   Now would you rather that the GNU team spend 10 man years (there must
   be more than 100,000 emacs users out there) answering questions or
   working on the GNU project?  

   There ae very kind volenteers who maintain FAQs on various subjects
   relevent to the GNU project -- those are time-consuming too!  Perhaps
   you might like to become expert on one or another of the GNU tools,
   and then becoming the "support desk" for that tool. That's what you're
   asking someone to do -- you could help the GNU project by doing it
   yourself!

Yes, I am willing to do this. However, I won't be able to ever do this
if I can't get the stuff installed in the first place. I'm really just
starting out with GNU stuff, and though I am more than willing to help
GNU out in any way reasonable, I just don't know enough about it yet
to be able to write and maintain a FAQ, or otherwise be the one people
can ask questions to. If there is anything I can contribute, I'm
willing (other than money - I'm willing, but broke. No amount of money
I could send would make an impact).

I'm glad I posted that original message (not least because several
people offered to help me get gcc up and running - and it turned out I
was only one step away). I think the discussion has been interesting.
I would like to add one more time that I'm not complaining about how
the GNU project is being run, just pointing out a problem that they
might not be able to see, because they're all experts in this kind of
stuff, and that means they probably would have a hard time
understanding what could be confusing about it to someone like me.

In case anyone is interested, the problems I had were caused by my
predecessor, who had things set up in a differnt way than the gcc
install scripts thought it would be, and the fact that I need Bison,
which I had never heard of at all before this. Also my knowledge of
shell scripts was pretty poor, and that held me up too.

Thanks again to all those who replied and helped me get gcc running.
--
Edward Hartnett			ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu

Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss