[LBo] Comments from Mark Shuttleworth, Blog Archive, Conflicting goals create tension in communities

[Jim Westbrook]

Sam Morgan wrote:

<quote>
The biggest difference between the two is their attitude to newbies.

Newbie: “This bit is confusing and I can’t work out how to get it to work.”
Debian: “RTFM.”
Ubuntu: “We’d better fix that then.”

Those Debian people who are upset at Ubuntu’s popularity may benefit 
from contemplating the above.
</quote>

Sam, this really hits the nail on the head! It seems that the Debian 
folks are only interested in attracting members of the geekdom 
population. While RTFM may be an adequate response for some of that 
group, it is not always the case. Sometimes the FM is woefully out of 
synch with the production code, so RTFM just makes their situation worse 
instead of better.

JimW