Re: [ox-en] Re: GNU/Linux distributions and commerce

• From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
• Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:16:04 +0200

Hi Johan and all!

Yesterday Johan Söderberg wrote:

The development of Debian during the past years is another, and even bigger proof for
this.

Could you expand a bit on this Stefan? Some time ago it almost sounded
the other way around, that all distributions spare Debian had been
overrun by commercial ventures.

Yes, it looked that way and IMHO actually were the case. There were
this Free Debian distribution but people used RedHat or SuSE - and a
few others. Only a few geeks swore on Debian. Even I for one am
(still) running SuSE.

Today the landscape changes, however. Debian based distributions
become more and more successful. All started with Knoppix for instance
some years ago. Today there is also Ubuntu which gets more and more
important. Both of them are Debian based and there are a couple more
out there. And even plain Debian installations get more and more.

So in the "middle ages" of Free Software it looked that distributions
needed the organizational power of a corporation. That Free Software
could be written outside of corporate structures but it is not
possible to create mass-compatible distributions. Today we see that it
mass-compatible distributions can be created in Free mode and they
gain success by the day. That RedHat leaves the field is just the flip
side of this coin.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

--
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• References:
  • [ox-en] Re: GNU/Linux distributions and commerce
    • From: Johan Söderberg

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