On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 02:32:22AM +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote: > On 2012-11-17 09:49:06 +1100 (+1100), Craig Small wrote: > > We'll be making AMIs; we'll be making whatever Azure needs; we'll > > make whatever openstack needs; all this requires is people to work > > on it. Thanks Brian and Craig, I agree with what you said on this front. > I merely wanted to point out that most other providers already offer > Debian images to their customers (some for quite a long time); and > that many of these other providers have not only already solved the > problem of building images using all free tools, but in fact even > run them on top of free software. Having not used Amazon's services, > I was honestly somewhat surprised to learn through this thread that > they did not provide such images themselves already. I think there are several factors at play here. One is that as long as we do the images for only one vendor, we will give the *impression* that we are somehow endorsing it. I don't want to endorse anyone and I want to avoid that impression as much as possible. But as long as we do have potential users on the corresponding platform (EC2, in the case we're discussing) and as long as the side conditions that Brian correctly enumerated are respected, I think we should serve those users. Because---looking from Debian's POV---they will be better served by using Debian on that platform than by using something else. (I don't want to go down the path of asking which, among cloud companies, is more Free Software friendly. We don't do that kind of discrimination for hardware companies. We rather offer as many Debian ports as we can. That is a simple and reasonable criteria, which could/should be reused in this context.) The other factor IMHO is reputation. A FOSS distribution is about software integration and pre-configuration, but is also about trusting a single vendor (Debian), instead of having to verify yourself the authenticity of every single piece of software you install. So while I personally applaud the efforts of public cloud providers that already offer Debian images, one thing is if it is *them* preparing the images for their clouds, a different one is if it is *us* (Debian). (*In theory*, there is even a matter of trademarks here, if those providers have modified what we call Debian and advertise it as pristine Debian, there might be a problem. But we are good guys :-), so those kinds of problems can usually be dealt with pretty easily.) In the end, I think all this is a huge opportunity to federate the interests and energies around using Debian on public clouds. If you, or anyone else on this list, is in touch with cloud providers that offer Debian images, please invite them here. The ideal outcome is indexing all Debian offerings on public clouds on our website as a new way we distribute Debian, and uniform as much as possible image contents and build toolchains. Offering that kind of choice to our users is good. It brings Debian to a larger public. Those users will then choose where they prefer to run Debian, based on the considerations they see fit (including the "which provider is more Free?" question that you mentioned). Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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