Re: Debian and Redhat - are most linux users missing the point?
<snip>
> You are perhaps referring the "Linux Standard Base" that RH and
> Deb have, for the moment, agreed to? The problem is that the
> greater RH's dominance becomes, the greater the chance that they
> will no longer see this kind of cooperation as desirable, and in
> effect decide on their own that RH *is* the "Linux Standard
> Base". If they don't try too hard too quickly, then I fear they
> just might get away with it.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post, when I asked if redhat
were the next MS.
The thing that worried me most about the poll I saw, was that there was
only one major distro, and such a huge gap between the others:
If all of the distros are growing at a rate of, say, 30%, then where
does that leave us in 1 years time?
the bigger get bigger and the smaller get smaller, relatively.
That is, debian has to grow at 130% just to stay in the same league as
redhat.
This is, perhaps, an inherent flaw of capitalism, although lets not go
into that.
With MS, once they were the biggest, (corporation/market share/whatever)
it became very hard for them to be knocked. They always had the
upperhand against any of their competitors. (Plus they may (pending
result of US suit against MS) have been prepared to play dirty)
Thus Redhat, being 3 times as large as debian will be able to push
debian aside if it desires, or to impose conditions on debian if it
decides to do so.
At the moment that seems impossible, and I think it is, but as linux
stops being a geeky sideline OS (as is happening at the moment), but
becomes a serious player, both in the server and desktop markets, then
linux will be mainstream, and then there will be no more friendly
cooperation between the distros.
This is why debian needs to expand its user base, apart from anything
else.
frankie
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