No More Free Beer?

As for Bittorrent, it was a first large scale experiment and there were a few glitches, but all of them have been fixed, and solutions were reported through a FAQ.

Simultaneously, the entire Mandrake 9.2 FTP tree, including full sources and contribs, was released publicly.

Mandrake Linux has been the first Linux distribution to release ISO images, and was soon followed by other distributions. We will continue to do it, so no need to worry for free beer! At the same time, all users can easily understand that increasing the number of Mandrake Club Subscribers and Mandrake products purchasers generates more revenues, and in the end this benefits to all (better and more featured product).

GD.

"The Fedora community" apparently does not exist. That is, everyone on the Fedora steering committee, plus all the key Fedora developers, are Red Hat employees. The architectural decisions are all being made by Red Hat engineers. The only difference appears to be that Fedora will not be sold in stores as "Red Hat 10", and its status is being talked down by Red Hat marketing to encourage business users to spring for Advanced Workstation 3.0 instead. The previous Fedora project appears to have been assimilated.

Now, I'm not necessarily against this, other than my concerns about how it is being communicated. I respect the Red Hat crew's technical skills very much.

It is possible that this will change in the future and that Red Hat will allow others to help make the decisions. But I see no reason why users with limited budgets shouldn't treat Fedora, when it ships, as if it were Red Hat 10.

It is interesting to note that cheap illegal copies of LindowsOS and Xandros have reportedly been spotted on the streets of Thailand and other Asian countries, right next to pirated Microsoft products.

I'm switching to Debian, and if the switch goes well, I'll donate to them. Since we don't run any commercial Linux software, the switch isn't a big deal. RedHat has done good things for Linux, but I simply can't afford to continue with them.

Add the pain of using RedHat Network to keep up to date, and the deficiencies of the apt port for RPMs compared to the Debian original, and it's no wonder I'm joining the growing ranks of those switching to Debian-based distributions. Sure, it's a little painful, but at this point it's actually less pain to go from RH7.3 to Woody than it is from 7.3 to 9.

I paid my membership fees to LWN to get LWN-style content, not rehashes of Distrowatch's biased (against Mandrake by the slant of most articles) opinion. If I wanted to get more of these articles, I would support Distrowatch.com, but now you're making me wonder if I should rather support a less biased news site ...

Mandrakesoft was looking to provide a service to the MandrakeClub members, as well as not shooting their boxed sales in the foot. Bittorrent is an ingenious solution to this problem (and I don't see anyone noting that ...). Sure, there have been teething problems, but over 10TB of data was served in under a week (please, go and budget for distributing that amount of data via private FTP and tell me what it comes to before you criticise them).

Also, the article states: "Of course, Linux is about choice and those unable to accept any form of commercialization or restrictions on availability from a Linux distribution can always turn to non-commercial Debian, Gentoo or any of the dozens of smaller projects for all their needs."

I have two questions on this:

1)Why is Gentoo classed as "non-commercial" when Mandrake isn't? Mandrake is just as open, and the entire distribution was released freely on the FTP mirrors at the same time the ISOs were made available to the Club members. Mandrake sells boxes and pressed CDs of their product, as does Gentoo!

Sure, there is a price difference, but the 2-CD Discovery Pack includes a printed manual for the difference, but a price difference doesn't make a competing distro "Free-beer", only "cheaper".

2)How many full-time developers does Debian fund working on KDE and GNOME and other projects (yes, funding distributions by buying product is a good way to support development!)?

Then, it seems that Ladislav is not aware that Mandrake already has a development community:

"Then there is Red Hat. Always innovative and always different from the rest, Red Hat has decided to buck the trend and turn their distribution over to the Fedora community for further development."

I find it hard to believe the "innovative" bit, since it seems more like Redhat is playing follow-the-leader. Mandrake already has heavy community involvement, with a number of packages in the main distribution being maintained by non-employee contributors. I don't see the need for LWN to do marketing spin for Redhat.

Maybe it's just me, but I haven't seen a positive article from Ladislav (except maybe the package management shoot-out which wasn't entirely fair ;-)).

BTW, I am "on a dial-up connection" (28.8k to be exact), and have club membership, but I am not "unhappy". I will get my pre-ordered CDs quite soon, but I believe that offering the ISOs to Club members (I got mine for free being a contributor) is a good idea, and adds value to the Club.

Please, give me a reason why I shouldn't rather be supporting Mandrakesoft than these trollish articles (considering LWN subscription and MandrakeClub membership fees are almost identical). Or maybe Ladislav wants to write an article on why LWN is no longer "Free-beer"? You restrict content to subscribers for a certain time, what gives you the right to criticise others who do it? Should I suggest readers should go elsewhere for their content (and not /., since they also give preferential treatment to paying customers)?

However, I fail to understand why it's so often misunderstood.