Community-based distributions as the answer [LWN.net]

Community-based distributions as the answer

Posted Mar 1, 2006 1:43 UTC (Wed) by freeio (guest, #9622)
In reply to: Forward looking by man_ls
Parent article: Linux fragmenting at last?

"True, there's always community-based distros to counter-balance corporate distributions; but they are an even bigger reason to participate and not let them languish."

Free software prospered even before there was commercial support. The well-known commercial distributions have helped various parts of the development along, to meet their own commercial needs, but it is indeed well to remember that even if the major vendors dropped all support today, that free software in general, and linux in particular would continue to develop.

So, yes, my most recent installs have been using the traditional community-based distribution (debian) not only for philosophical reasons, but because none of the high-dollar distributions support the Sun U5 hardware I run, while debian does. That profit-motive makes it not worth their time to support anything but the potentially high-volume architectures, and so the last version of Red Hat which supported Sun 5U was 6.2, and the last version of SuSE which supported Sun 5U was 7.3.

If we use only the few commercial distributions, then we are well on our way to lock-in and monoculture. Free/libre software development not only does not require that outcome, but provides the means to avoid it. That is not the feared fragmentation, but rather the healthy operation of a free software ecology.

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Community-based distributions as the answer

Posted Mar 1, 2006 17:02 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I think that saying "Free software prospered before ..." should be added with the caveat "in a completely different way than now." Most of the people I knew who were doing Free Software were doing it at universities or in their spare time and the number of people was MUCH MUCH less than is currently doing it. This is because of communication changes (a larger percentage of programmers on the Internet), culture changes (more risk-averse managers feeling ok with non-propietary software), and a lot of other socio/politico/economic changes that have made things the way they are now.

The second caveat is that if Red Hat and Novell were plundered in medieval fashion by some unscrupulous company tomorrow, their programmers put on stakes in the public commons, managers who accepted Free Software in their business publically whipped, etc.. Free Software would survive. It just wouldnt survive in the way it currently does, and very less likely in the way it did in the past. From what one can tell in various other population culture shifts.. people will find some completely new way to subvert the older system using Free Software.