Re: On cadence and collaboration
Hi, Mark:
On Wednesday 05 August 2009 23:28:19 Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
[...]
> I think most are waiting to see if Debian and Ubuntu can do this. If we
> can, I am very confident we will get a group of other distributions
> participating in the version harmonisation discussions in the first
> round. To win Novell we would have to actually demonstrate the process
> works, I think. And to win Red Hat we would need to demonstrate it works
> with everyone else first. At least, that's my impression from
> conversations to date.
I don't think too many conversations are needed to reach such a conclusion but
plain common sense: Red Hat is the big guy in this yard and it's a
for-profit company (just like Canonical) so, at least in the short run, it
benefits from their bussiness enemies (like SUSE or Canonical) to stay
divided and flakey. Only in the case that their competitors make a deal that
can put in danger their lidership they'll contemplate going into the fest if
only to leverage the field. On the other hand Canonical it's obviously the
company that benefits the most with such maneouvre (not saying this is a good
or bad thing 'per se': bussiness are there for the profit and in this
specific case I'm inclined to think that, properly managed, Canonical's
benefit is quite aligned with Debian's and even the Linux user comunity as a
whole one).
On the other hand and being quite cynical, if it would happen the "freeze at a
time" among Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical, being all of them for profit, this
would be a very unstable equilibrium since they all would be very pushed into
cheating to their own advantage (hey! you released one week earlier... yes,
but you launched your press release two weeks in advance! etc.)
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