Re: RH and GNOME
On Wed, Jul 22, 1998 at 01:16:56AM -0500, Zed Pobre wrote:
[...]
> The only valid point that I've seen raised applies no matter who
> is an employee of whom, and that is if Redhat decides to throw a lot
> of stupid-but-cute extensions on things that become so popular that
> they are practically "standard", there may be a problem.
> Problem for the world that buys Redhat, maybe.
> I guess the problem is that I'm one of the people who never really
> believed that Debian was in this for market share. Nobody mentioned
> it when I became a developer. The two things that were mentioned as
> important were Free Software, and quality distribution. I like those
> things.
If we have to rewrite every app out there to make them do the right thing
I doubt we were be able to buil quality distribution, or any
distribution at all. When you think about market share, you must remember
that includes the developers of the software we package. If more of them
use Debian, that will make our work easier.
> And hey, market share is cool; it means that sometimes when I
> walk into a new place and start work, I'll be working on Debian (heh,
> I know it's late here now; I'm starting to dream), but other than that
> it doesn't mean a damn to me, and if the price for my being
> occassionally able to work on Debian systems is that I have to become
> paranoid and distrustful of the community
C'mon, the wold is not black and white, there is a continuum of gray
shades (unless you use a green phosphorus monitor, of course).
A little bit (just a little bit) of paranoia makes our life longer.
Mothers tell their children "don't talk to strangers". Does it ruin
children's life?
[...]
> If the goal of Debian is a quality distribution of Free Software,
> then it doesn't matter who makes what broken widgets in common use.
> The calling card of Debian is that it works, it's Free Software, and
> it gets the job done. As long as Debian stays that way, I'll probably
> stay with Debian, and to make use of someone else's (yours?) extreme
> example, I think there are people who will choose software that works
> over software that looks nifty but comes up with the BSOD twice a
> day.
Of course, that's an extreme example, but look at the RPM vs deb thing.
It's not that extreme, and we are facing it _now_.
More "market share" means more developers using Debian (not just more
Debian developers, but Linux apps developers), doing things "the Debian
way", and that means our goal (a high quality distribution) will be
easier to achieve.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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