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Re: 1 year release good enough.



On 01/01/12 23:58, Russ Allbery wrote:
"dE ."<de.techno@gmail.com>  writes:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
You might have 60% usage of Debian but for the world it's 0.02%.
I've never been fond of putting too much weight on this sort of
statistic.

One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of
a group of people who are working together to create something that,
primarily, we all want to use.  Making it usable for everyone else as well
is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot
about.  But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that
world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the
Debian project to be a success.

Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian,
every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran
into because it's Debian and I can help make it better.  It's *fun* if I
can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an influx of
new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but that's
about *keeping* Debian successful, not about *making* Debian successful.

If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the
rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a
success, and I don't really care whether that number ever moves off of
0.02%.  One of the great things about free software is that we're not a
business: we don't live or die by market share, we aren't going to get
bought out by someone else if we don't become a big enough fish, and we
don't have to grow 10% a year or implode.  It would certainly be *nice* to
attract more people and more users and improve even faster, and I
certainly wouldn't want to stand in the way of that, but it's not part of
my metric of success.


GNU is a wildebeest which's vulnerable to Lions (MS), and sometimes leopards (Apple), and Debian is one of the wildebeests.

It has to be defended by companies supporting it, and they have to attempt destroy the Microsoft ecosystem the same way Microsoft does... otherwise the wildebeest will be extinct.

Thus, it's critical to hate and make people hate Microsoft and dive into politics in order to make opensource desktops successful. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Rather, I personally have a more aggressive philosophy.


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