On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 12:48:47PM +0100, Robert Hart wrote:
> On Fri, 31 May 2002, [iso-8859-1] Mike Martin wrote:
>
> > Has anyone got any thoughts on this
>
> Yes. I started using Linux because I got pissed off with all those
> marketroids controlling my computing experience.
>
> Although Redhat's idea of what my computer should be is a lot closer to
> mine than Microsoft, in the end I had to stop using red hat for exactly
> the same reason. (like releasing a major distribution with a snapshot of
> gcc for it's compiler)
>
> I was looking at www.linux-emporium.co.uk yesterday, and noticed that any
> reference to RedHat Linux had been replaced with Thread Linux. I can
> understand why. Still it made me realise that no 'commercial' distribution
> is ever going to give me what I want.
>
> debian/rules
Good point. The problem is, and I suspect this is the real reason, that
the business models the commercial distributers are using generally doesn't
work. (apart from Red Hat because it is almost seen as some kind of
standard)
Thus we have seen distributers switch to subscription based systems
(Mandrake IIRC) and several other commercial dists. have folded. I'm
sure that this effort is simply to reduce the amount of duplicated
effort between the companies (which after all, is one of the points of
GNU, FSF etc) so that they can lay off programmers and spend money
developing the parts of the system that they feel there is call for.
What the outcome of all of this will be is debateable. Does the world
want a chicken breast with a variety of sauces, or does the world
want an extravagent, and at some time unmanageable menu of duck, stake,
chicken, pork...? Some kind of happy medium perhaps?
I think that most people will agree that if you're setting up a server
to do a job then you will never do a flat install of RedHat or what ever
and expect it to do the job as well as can be. You will always do your
own little tweaks here and there, whether it's the choice of MTA or
whatever, we all have our preferences. Having a common code base beneath
that, the same sets of GNU tools and all the files in the same place
(FSH) isn't really going to effect that.
I'm sticking with debian too. ;-)
Matthew
--Matthew Sackman Nottingham England
mysql> select * from users where clue > 0; 0 rows returned. -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Sat 01 Jun 2002 - 11:31:16 BST