On Mon, 2012-10-15 at 08:11 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > Do you remember the sorry state of, for instance hotplugging of devices > and the utterly poor integration with desktops back in 2004 when Ubuntu > first started? It was a _huge_ step forward. I didn't say everything was Ubuntu made or makes was wrong or from the ground up evil ;-) Still the question remains open somewhat why a separate community/distro was needed for this... I mean Debian is in most cases quite open towards contributions. Further, I'm fully aware that Ubuntu donates to Debian... but on the other hand they probably make a lot of money by using it... so this is not so "special". And when looking at reports like "Who wrote the Linux kernel", Canonical plays IMHO a very minor role with respect to contributions. > I don't think it would be possible to make some of the > large-scale-across-the-board changes that Ubuntu does, in Debian. We're > a lot of people, we have a culture of discussing every change in every > detail and in practice people feel like they can rightfully block other > people's work. We're also generally unable to choose a single solution > and prefer to say «both» rather than A or B. That's true... and sometimes it's a problem. But it can also be good if there are not few people or one person being in control, that decide where to go. I mean when looking e.g. at Unity... it seems that there is some broad dislike towards it (at least from people I know; I for myself, have never tested it... so this is no judgement from my side). > I use RMS as a guide in the same way that a boat captain would use a > lighthouse. It's good to know where it is, but you generally don't want > to find yourself in the same spot. This made me laugh so much :D But I think he's not so untrue... there is a slight and silent but steady commercialisation going on in the open source world. While this has the advantage of brining funding into development and support from vendors... it also has the obvious drawbacks. Cheers, Chris.
Attachment:
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature