On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 10:30:07PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> They're investing in writing better tools, and they're keeping them
> private so as to maintain a competative advantage with them over Red Hat,
> SuSE, Fedora, and so forth. Including Debian, for that matter.
...damnit, I never thought of that. And you know why not? Because on
some level I thought that all the noise they make about 'contributing
back to Debian' was more than just lip service. I had (stupidly)
wanted to believe that it wasn't *just* their PR machine at work.
If you're right, then it would mean that their concept of
'contributing back' means to purchase 'goodwill' at the lowest
available price - which would be consistent with the behaviour we've
seen from them so far. In effect, treating it as another asset, and
behaving like a classical company that focusses on the bottom line. So
that's actually plausible.
I don't know about other people, but personally I do not appreciate
being treated as a tradeable asset. And I am reminded of a passage
from Pratchett's /Carpe Jugulum/:
Mightily Oats: "There is a very interesting debate raging at the
moment about the nature of sin, for example."
Granny Weatherwax: "And what do they think? Against it, are they?"
Mightily Oats: "It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and
white issue. There are so many shades of grey."
Granny Weatherwax: "Nope."
Mightily Oats: "Pardon?"
Granny Weatherwax: "There's no greys, only white that's got
grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And
sin, young man, is when you treat people as
things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
Mightily Oats: "It's a lot more complicated than that--"
Granny Weatherwax: "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot
more complicated than that, they means they're
getting worried that they won't like the
truth. People as things, that's where it
starts."
Mightily Oats: "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
Granny Weatherwax: "But they starts with thinking about people as
things...."
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
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