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Debian WannabeesDebian WannabeesPosted Sep 11, 2003 14:28 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659)Parent article: Open Query: what replaces RedHat? Interesting that Mandrake and now RedHat are trying to move to distributed maintenance of packages by the community in order to reduce their costs. Meanwhile, Lindows, Libranet, Knoppix and many others already have access to thousands of high-quality community-built and actively-maintained packages by virtue of their Debian base. As the author of the letter says, RedHat hasn't proven they can make this work, and Mandrake certainly hasn't demonstrated this. After all, why should any developer sink time into packaging a piece of software for the benefit of only a single company's distro's users and community -- and effectively for that company? (Incidentally, the recent Gentoo fork exposes this problem with that distribution as well.) I'm not at all optimistic that any company can get support from others to do its dirty work in this way; IMO only a non-profit maintainer-governed model is sustainable in the long run. Indeed, the case for corporate governance of distros is not unlike that for proprietary software: need a corporate entity to fund creation, coordinate releases, enforce quality control. But that idea's time has past: development of software from kernels to office suites has been communitized, and Linux distributions are going and will inevitably continue to go that way as well. So why not take the bit of time to pop in a Knoppix CD and start the switch to a distribution with a development, quality release, and governance model which is proven to be sustainable and scalable? Or you could just keep wasting your time switching back and forth among various Debian wannabees...
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