Re: RH and GNOME
On Tue, Jul 21, 1998 at 07:40:17PM +0200, joost@pc47.mpn.cp.philips.com wrote:
[...]
> Given RedHat's current support of the GPL, any fears for future adverse
> decisions by RedHat are both ungrounded and irrelevant, because Debian can
> fork off any last GPL'ed version.
OK, let me play devil's advocate for a minute (not that I think RH will
became our next arch-enemy):
We (the Linux community) have seen how our non-Linux competitors like to
do their business:
- closed standards.
- APIs suddenly changing, forcing the competitors to play catch-up.
- Free licenses going non-free, hoping the market will follow the
"industry standard" and forcing us to work on our own free version.
We have more or less suffered all of those tactics (I20, X, ...), and we
are still alive and kicking because we have a few benefits they don't:
stability, adaptability, freedom to the the Right Thing...
If RH becomes the dominant player in the Linux market, and they start
doing the "monopolistic" thing, what will we offer to convince a Linux
user to choose Debian?
- philosophy
- better package management system
- better admin/config tools
- more stability
- i18n out of the box
- ...?
If we want to offer something more than philosophy we have to work on it,
and make the users know we have it. Havoc's suggestions about
integrating apt and our menu/documentation system on GNOME look like
something that we must do. As we must move the new dpkg into the light,
if only to make everyone know dpkg is not a dead project.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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