ESR's goodbye note

ESR's goodbye note

Posted Feb 21, 2007 17:11 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

Almost the same thing could be said about the Debian project... it has had a lot of infighting... and various political battles that those that don't care about the principles of Free Software don't care much about.

To me, struggle is a sign of a healthy project... not some signal of doom.

Oh, wait... ESR switched to Ubuntu... the people leaching off of Debian. Same difference.

I agree with the person who said that dpkg isn't really techincally better than rpm... but Debian's strick packaging policy, bringing everything into the Debian fold of packages and maintaining it (rather than a large number of semi-common packages coming from third-party repositories)... has been a plus.

rpm's main problem is that there are indeed quite a few poorly built packages out there.

I don't exactly agree with ESR's opinion on adopting proprietary codecs. I prefer the situation where the end user can do that if they so choose... but the distro takes a stand to keep that stuff out officially.

Linspire has also opened up CNR for multiple distributions so I'm not sure there is something special about the Ubuntu/Freespire connection even if one were to totally buy into the "we must adopt proprietary codecs as an official part of the distro" mentality.

Just out of curiousity ESR, what's next? Should we all buy a copy of CrossOver Office and a license for Microsoft Office?

I must admit I'm a Fedora Core user for personal desktops and RHEL (Academic) and CentOS user on servers. I've used Debian and Ubuntu under some circumstances... but my decision was usually made for personal preference reasons rather than technical reasons. All distros share 95% (a made up number that sounds reasonable) of the same software so making a choice on preference isn't exactly illogical.

ESR, if you were unhappy and left, good for you. A small percentage of folks switch all of the time... and it is good to try out different distros. I'm glad we have all of this competition to keep the major players on their toes... a factor sorely missing somewhere else.

---

to post comments