SJV fell in the weeds again
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Nov 28, 2007 3:32 PM EDT |
Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu?? All three have major corporate backing, and would not exist without it. Can it be that SJV has never heard of Debian? |
| jdixon Nov 28, 2007 3:39 PM EDT |
> All three have major corporate backing, and would not exist without it. Ah, you noticed. :) I think he was hoping no one would. Seriously, I think he believes that only corporate backed distributions are "safe". I don't think he trusts the true community distributions to be around in 5 years. I consider this validated by the fact that he completely ignores Mandriva, which is still on shaky financial ground (though no less so than Novell, in my opinion). The fact that both Debian and Slackware have proven him wrong for almost 15 years now doesn't seem to occur to him. |
| bigg Nov 28, 2007 3:58 PM EDT |
> Can it be that SJV has never heard of Debian? I think it's safe to say things are better when he doesn't write about it. You know, he's kind of like Enderle when it comes to Debian. He's been arguing for years that the end of Debian is just around the corner. That's about as likely to happen as USC and Notre Dame shutting down their football programs, but as long as he doesn't admit he was wrong, he satisfies himself. He'll never bring himself to admit that there's a good free software project without significant corporate backing, Linux distribution or otherwise. |
| bigg Nov 28, 2007 4:01 PM EDT |
Also, I'd throw Sabayon, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint on there as distros that he'll never accept. |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 28, 2007 4:15 PM EDT |
I think Debian and Slackware are more than credible choices when it comes to stability as well as long-term viability of their respective teams and plain old rock-solidness as far as the code goes. Nobody's going to buy out Debian, and probably not Slackware either (although the possibility exists). But Debian should remain Debian for the forseeable future. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 29, 2007 7:56 AM EDT |
As a Debian watcher and user for ...byCromm 12 years!!!, I can say that the greatest danger for Debian is long past. When the DFSG and Debian Developer vetting process were solidly established, around 2000, was when it might have crashed. By by standardizing the developer process and making it reasonably difficult, like the Mandarins and their Confucian Civil Service Exam, the bureaucracy becomes self-sustaining. |
| vainrveenr Nov 29, 2007 8:14 AM EDT |
Quoting:Nobody's going to buy out Debian, and probably not Slackware either (although the possibility exists).One certainly hopes not!! Some speculation earlier on this year about which distros would succumb to making IP-Patent deals with MS after its big one with Novell a year ago. Fedora and Ubuntu are of course respectively part of Red Hat and Shutlleworth's Canonical. Thank goodness Red Hat and Canonical have not [yet?] succumbed to MS's IP Patent threats/deals! As noted before, Patrick Volkerding has been Slackware's maintainer and Torvalds-like "benevolent dictator" from the beginning. Warren Woodford is similarly the founder of MEPIS, another great liveCD distro that seems to has been overtaken in downloads and publicity over the last year or so by the likes of PCLinuxOS, Sabayon and Mint. In any case, both distro maintainers Pat V and Warren could conceivably be future indirect targets of anti-FOSS initiatives, such as those discussed at LXer. Other comments regarding SJVN's narrow reviews of Community Linuces could lead one to guess further conspiracy theories about why SJVN really included and omitted the distros he did in his eWEEK piece. Of further possible significance here, when one visits SUN's own 'Choose your Linux distribution' webpage at http://www.sun.com/software/linux/get.xml one gets a choice of » Red Hat » SUSE » Ubuntu Is this entirely coincidence? SUN's own community-type *NIX "distro" is OpenSolaris. |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 29, 2007 9:20 AM EDT |
When you're talking desktops, which is what SJVN does, I'm hoping he bases his distro focus on what is really getting deployed on a large scale and what CIO-types are telling him. It's entirely possible that I've missed them, but I haven't seen a lot of stories lately along the lines, "Mega-corporation X will deploy Red Hat across 10,000 desktops." I guess the coverage should be shaped by what's actually happening. Huge companies have a lot of criteria that must be satisfied before they'll pick a desktop OS, and I have a feeling that SJVN is more plugged into this process than others -- certainly more than I am. For me, I do a Slackware install and think to myself, "this would be a great corporate desktop -- it's extremely stable, sticks around for a long time, has a ton of great apps and doesn't encourage willy-nilly updating or adding of dubious applications." I have the same feeling about Debian with a locally managed and thoroughly tested repository. I really can't see most companies paying an annual subscription to Red Hat for an office desktop, even something as small as $50 a year, when they can either pay once or not at all. But I've been wrong before -- and I'm cheap and work for cheapskates, so that shapes the way I think about such things. Still, long-term support in the form of security updates is essential. Red Hat doesn't go five + years out on its releases for any other reason than that its customers demand it. From my own experience in offices, they never want to upgrade anything unless absolutely necessary -- and even then, they don't what to do it. One thing I've noticed about SJVN, he seems partial to Mepis -- which isn't Suse or Red Hat. |
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