Re: Why Debian

[Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 2:57 AM, Alberto Salvia Novella
<es20490446e@gmail.com> wrote:
> Note: Since I'm not subscribed to this mailing list at the moment, please
> send also a copy to my email when replying.
> ----------
>
> Normally I write very short, like a Haiku
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku>; but I think this letter shall be the
> exception. So excuse me 😳

Yeah, poetry is not always the best medium for communication.

> ***************
>  THE HISTORY
> ***************
>
> [...]

Interesting history. And I understand dreams, BTW.

>
> ************
>  THE POINT
> ************
>
> The point is yet very simple: I suspect Debian has a mindset that makes it
> stand out, I can imagine what kind of values these are, and I want them to
> become widespread. And now I feel I have the opportunity to show and
> convince the Ubuntu community to adapt them, and probable with it many
> people around the world.

More power to you.

> So I wanted to ask you the following question so it can't be said it's only
> my imagination. Summarizing:
>
> Which are the very important reasons why do you prefer Debian over Ubuntu?
>

My own history --

I've watched the PC industry grow up on the back of "free". It's still
not openly recognized, but Apple has twice gone the route of opening
up a platform and then putting the ropes on it to suck the profits
out. In between, Microsoft did the same thing. The computer industry
has continually tried the lip service approach, Open-This Consortium
and Open-That, but not willing to really turn loose.

Red Hat and Ubuntu are in the same process. Many others copying the
idea. Incubate some freedom and then capture it. It's not really the
money, though, it's the control. Google is shifting that direction,
too, near as I can tell.

I tried "free software" back in the late eighties, before I was quite
aware of the full nature of Stallman's arguments, the differences
between abandonware and freeware and shareware and Free-as-in-freedom.
I discovered that free was only worth what you were willing to put
into it. For several years I turned my back on the gnu project,
thinking Stallman was doing the world a service by being a "voice
crying in the wilderness" and helping keep the world balanced, but not
being willing to risk leaving the security of the commercial contract
behind.

My first experience with Linux was in parallel with my first
experience with the BSDs -- MkLinux and netBSD on 68K Macs. I was
working on Mac OS X and openBSD for a while, then shifted to running
mainly Fedora.

I was naive enough, as Mac OS X become a viable option, to hope that
Steve was going to put his weight behind a Darwin project the same way
RedHat was putting their weight behind what became the Fedora project.
If Steve's switch hadn't been so binary, I might still be using Apple
stuff.

(No technical reason to drop the PowerPC entirely, it was strictly
jumping into bed with Intel. And for no good reason, no real benefit,
when you recognize that Intel hasn't really gotten past the 1.n
Gigahertz limit on commodity products. And that 1.n GHz Intel CPUs
have zero technical advantage over 1.n GHz.)

I wandered over here when Fedora came under the influence of the
systemd crowd. Same group as was behind unifying /bin and /usr/bin,
near as I can tell.

If you ask them technical questions, they shout you down. There are
good engineers who help you with insults, but that's a different
thing. Those guys really do help, and they really do listen, all they
while they are arguing with you.

The systemd crowd, no. It's about control.

(Yeah, the init scripts need work. But you don't solve the problems of
different ways to juice fruit by forcing apples and oranges and dorian
fruit into the same blender and then insulting people who can't drink
the resulting mess.)

Freedom is important. We don't all use our computers exactly the same way.

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.