Pine controversy

[Kurt Cockrum]

Here's my 2-cents worth on the MUA-causing-users-to-depart
controversy.  How soon can you pay me my 2 cents? :)

SCN's mission, AFAIR (as far as I recall) was to provide minimal
basic internet services to those who for various reasons couldn't
affort to get them from existing commercial offerings, i. e. "have-nots".

Early on in the discussions of SCN people talked about significant
portions of the populace being left out of access, as commercial
interests scrambled for the most lucrative parts of new markets,
leaving the rest out in the cold.

This "left-out" sector was identified as the poor and disenfranchised
of various kinds, social-change activists and organizations, non-profits,
neighborhood & grassroots groups, minorities (maybe even misfits :),
and others, I think, chiefly and variously self-identified.

As far as I know, we are carrying this out.  I'm sure there are those
who are dissatisfied, but I would imagine that that ought to be more
substantive than dissatisfaction with the user interface of a particular
Mail User Agent.

As long as a keyboard mediates access to things like
e-mail, there isn't an application in the land that anybody can say
honestly is "easy to use", but if one sticks with it, one can get
pretty fluent.  Think about it.  Even something as simple
as driving a stick-shift automobile was hard the first time around,
for those of use old enough to remember.  And there were only 5 "keys":
clutch, brake, accelerator, steering wheel and gear-shift :)

Let's not forget that it takes years and years to learn to use
natural languages effectively, and that's even with the hardware
assist Chomsky says is built-in (with, sadly, build-in expiration;
adults never *do* do it well).

Frankly, the people who think StupidLandUSA provides more attractive
services than SCN are welcome to go there, and we ought to even give
them good recommendations as the sort of users every ISP dreams of :)

What! you say I owe you 2 cents! whaddaya mean! :)
--kurt
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