Re: potato late, goals for woody (IMHO)
Colin Watson wrote on Tue May 02, 2000 um 05:33:32AM:
> Yes, getting new users is great, and some of those will become
> developers in time, but I really don't think that "imminent death of
> Debian predicted, film at 11" is a useful argument - particularly not
> when I would lay bets that the number of Debian users is growing faster
> than ever before. Yes, Red Hat has out-marketed us, but I see plenty of
> Linux users trying out Debian and never looking back once they realize
> its potential (most of the active Linux users in my university, for
> one). Let's work towards making Debian and GNU/Linux in general more
> newbie-friendly, as it's a worthy goal; but let's not get too paranoid
> about it either.
Sorry, but I am worried about the growth in the small server market.
People that have to do the decissions now have to choose between RedHat
or SuSE, since these distributions can offer up-to-date software in
their stable distribution (whatever they mean by stable). Of course, old
debian administrators would use Potato or Slink with some recompiled
packages, but new people don't know about such things and just ignore
Debian at all.
Don't forget that servers and mass-installs are often the places where
people come the first time in contanct with Linux, eg. on schools,
universities etc. Commercial distributors have realized this fact for a
long time, so they change their politics to set their distribution as
the default distribution in people's mind.
The market is changing, and the mentioned prozess is recursive. If
Debian won't make *compromisses* and change the politics in the next
time, we will lose more and more new (and old) users, forcing them to
change to alternative distributions and on the end, the commercial
distributions will beat us.
I'm worried about changing the balances from realy free software to
more and more commercial stuff, I don't like more and more machines to
become infiltrated by big-market distributions like SuSE/RedHat even
if the people wanted to get away from the windows-shit and get a free
system. The line must be drawn here - but the Debian community just
seems to inhibit itself.
Eduard.
--
=====================================================================
Eduard Bloch <eb@zombie.inka.de>; HP: http://eduard.bloch.com/edecosi
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**
Plug-and-Play is really nice, unfortunately it only works 50% of the time.
To be specific the "Plug" almost always works. --unknown source
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