Re: Suggested press release in reaction to RHAT dropping sparc and alpha

[Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
> So I read in OSNews today[1] that Red Hat is dropping support for the
> alpha and sparc architectures.  I think we should let it be widely known
> that we still support sparc and alpha users 100%  Maybe something like
> this...

I don't exactly like this sort of propaganda. It doesn't sound correct
or fair to me to send out press releases that reply to other vendors'
press releases and directly intend to grab users from them.

Debian has, in the past, always expressed the benefits of its
distribution, independly of what other vendors do or don't.

> The Debian Project (http://www.debian.org/) producers of Debian GNU/Linux,
> the premier Linux distribution created by the community for the community
> reaffirmed today its' ongoing commitment to supporting Linux on the Sparc
> and Alpha architectures.

This is marketing propaganda that Debian should not join.  "the
premier Linux distribution" is something a third party can say, but
not the one affected.  Otherwise we would stop being authentic.

> Sparc and Alpha users enjoy the same vast breadth of free software (some
> 10,000 packages in our stable distribution,) bug fixes, and timely
> security updates as any other Debian user.  Because our operating system
> is a labor of love not a money-making enterprise, they will never be held
> hostage to the shifting agendas of commercial vendors.

Maybe it would be more helpful to post some information on the
redhat-alpha and redhat-sparc lists so those people that may be in
trouble soon, will be informed.

However, ceasing support for Alpha and Sparc by Red Hat does not imply
the demise of Red Hat Linux for Alpha or Sparc.  Please note that
there's still mips/redhat and m68k/redhat even though Red Hat Inc. has
never supported these architectures.  Hence, telling users of rh/sparc
and rh/alpha to switch to Debian because they can't use their system
anymore, can't upgrade etc. would probably be wrong.  Red Hat Inc.,
however, won't support them and won't create security updates for
them, but they will most probably be able to continue running their
machines with a Red Hat (like/based) distribution.

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
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