The reinvention of Progeny (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge has published a study of how Progeny survived the dotcom crash. "Not that Progeny Debian was a failure in the end, [Progeny founder Ian] Murdock hurries to add. Admittedly, the product failed in the stores. However, the simple fact that the company had built the distribution provided proof that it understood Debian and could develop a product that would be downloaded by thousands of people. If Progeny had not developed Progeny Debian, he now believes, then the company would have had no tangible proof of its skills to secure new custom development contracts."

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The reinvention of Progeny (NewsForge)

Posted Mar 29, 2005 16:56 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

It seems Ubuntu became in a way what Progeny should have become - a value-added Debian that provides a more viable platform to market services (support etc) upon.

Keeping tabs on Murdoch

Posted Mar 29, 2005 19:49 UTC (Tue) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link]

I haven't read the article yet, but it has always seemed to me that Ian Murdoch is a couple of years ahead of the curve in ideas (ever since starting Debian), but he hasn't been able to translate that into business in a bigger way.

The reinvention of Progeny (NewsForge)

Posted Mar 29, 2005 22:06 UTC (Tue) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Well, I don't know about "should have become". Progeny was created to develop and commercialize some very cool research work than Ian did. The Progeny Debian distribution was part of the base for that work, but even then the world did not really need another Linux distribution. The Ubuntu folk are doing some nice work, and if they can make money at it, more power to them, but it's not exactly leading edge. The NOW stuff was (or could have been).

The reinvention of Progeny (NewsForge)

Posted Mar 31, 2005 4:18 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Actually, when I hired Ian to be CEO of Progeny it was to do a supported Debian distribution. But this was before its time, as there was not much commercial demand for Linux, compared to today. Ian and John Hartmann decided that commercializing NOW was more interesting. I think the advent of big cheap disks did more to kill that than anything else.

Bruce