On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 08:24:44PM -0500, Joseph Carter wrote: > You know what the big difference between Corel, Stormix, and Progeny is? > How many of the people working on Corel Linux are Debian developers, > active or otherwise? Not many. Stormix? A couple more, but the obvious > examples have actually left the company for one reason or another. Please name these people. The only debian developer that has left stormix is Garth (whom i haven't met). Garth left Stormix about 15 months ago, when there were about 6 people working at Stormix. There are now about 60, with about half programmers. Truthfully, only Ryan Murray and I are debian developers right now, but there are two more in the queue, and most of the rest working here are dedicated Free Software writers even if they aren't part of Debian (can Corel even say that of their staff? i have no idea). We also work quite closely with many debian-jp people on our japanese-localized version. we've also donated hardware to the debian-jp project. (see http://debian.or.jp/Sponsors.html ). Sure progeny has lots of debian developers, but lets see you try to attract 30 debian developers to your city to work for you....we have almost 30 developers, and we're not going to exclude good free software programmers just because they aren't in debian yet. And find me a Corel developer that has the gpg signatures that i do. In fact, find me any Corel developer that has any signatures of a debian developer. I believe that at the moment, i have more debian developer signatures on my gpg key than any other developer. i think that indicates at least a small amount of communication is happening somewhere. don't forget ftp.ca.debian.org (which also has a kernel mirror) > How much of Storm or Corel's work has gone back into Debian? Very little. i can only think of one piece of software that Stormix has written that is not GPL. i think comparing Stormix to Corel is apples to oranges. i think Ryan Murray will probably have something to say about this too, but he's in Las Vegas at comdex right now, pitching the advantages of debian to all who come past. You can even see debian logos all over our booth! ( http://people.debian.org/~plypkie/debian_comdex.jpg ) Last time i talked to the Corel guys, they came over to our booth to ask US if THEIR distro was potato or not. gimme a break! > Most of what they've done has been completely useless outside their own > distributions. From Progeny, how's dexter just for a start? That's what > Progeny does. Bull! dexter is a configuration program. so is storm administration system. please explain why dexter is somehow better. I can see how you might not want the Stormix install program in debian, because debian already has one, and they're aimed at different audiences. but i don't think it's "completely useless outside" our distro. For instance, have you seen the code for the "keyboard detector"? it has some really neat code that asks the user questions about keys on their keyboard, and can determine which keyboard you have usually in about 3 keystrokes (although it takes a little more for qwerty keyboards because of the abundance of small variations). This is useful code, and i haven't seen a similar program anywhere else. This is just one example. </rant> anyway....I like the things that Progeny is doing, but i think putting Stormix in the same category as Corel is silly. thanks for listening :) -Pete Lypkie
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