Re: Reality check! [was: Re: Debian goes big business?]
On Sat, Jan 23, 1999 at 04:10:52PM +0100, Paul Seelig wrote:
> The first thing a future Debian entrepreneur interested in financial
> success would have to address would be to fix all those things which
> we Debian propeller heads have preferred to mostly neglect up until
> now: ease of install and ease of useability for both sysadmins and
> users. These things have to become *at least* as dead easy as it
> *already is* with SuSE. It would be a very healthy experience for
> everybody to go out once in a while and purchase a SuSE copy and do
> a fresh install with it. Some would be astonished and some might
> even be frightened to see what Debian definitely lacks.
These are some excellent points, and I hope people read this and think
about it. When you are getting money for something, you have a
responsiblity to someone else, usually your company, but also, in the
larger picture, whoever ends up paying for what you do. While there
are some drawbacks, there are also many positive aspects to this - it
forces you, for better or worse, to work with some kind of schedule,
and towards some specific goals, instead of just "it works for me".
Debian right now has all its "it works for me" ducks in a row - it is
great and wonderful for those of us who can appreciate it, but,
without some people really working to make it easier (and having the
financial backing to maybe do it full time), it probably isn't going
to have broad appeal real soon. Once again, to most of us, this is
probably not a grave problem - Debian won't have trouble continuing in
its present form, it's not like we'll go away because of lack of
funds, but, on the other hand, we will continue to occupy an
increasingly smaller portion of the market.
Maybe now would be a good time to create a debian-business? I'm not
sure "-consultants" is really broad enough. This is something I'm
quite interested in. I firmly believe in the ideals of free software,
and, infact, like free software so much that I'd like to spend all day
working on it/for it. However, I'm not sure that that aspect of
things has been sorted out yet... it should be an interesting couple
of years:->
Ciao,
--
David Welton http://www.efn.org/~davidw
Debian GNU/Linux - www.debian.org
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