LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Andrew Reid <andrew.reid@plug.cx>
  To  : <michaeld@senet.com.au>
  Date: 20 Apr 2001 17:09:02 +0930

Re: Mandrake8.0 released...

On 20 Apr 2001 06:19:25 +0000, michaeld@senet.com.au wrote:

> But "reward a job well done" or "It costs them money to make it"???  Most of the
> software they provide is GPLd or BSDd.  They didn't write it, not did they fund
> someone else to write it.  They may have written a slick installer, pulled
> various packages together, and performed some basic quality control, but what
> Mandrake, like RH/SuSE/whoever are really doing is making things convenient by
> providing free(dom) software at a cheap cost.  If any particular distro
> disappears open-source software will continue to be developed and enhanced - it
> may be harder to obtain, but that's all.  Distros are important, but not that
> important.

Au contraire. While distributions aren't what keeps OpenSource
development going, they are what makes Linux viable on the desktop, or
what makes 'learning that Linux thing' possible.

I'm sure that if learning Linux meant building my own system from
scratch, downloading bits and pieces from all over the Internet and
gluing them up together, I'd not be here right now.

Distributions are what made Ximian possible. If Ximian didn't have that
nice installer and updater (which depends upon some form of dependancy
system such as RPM) they wouldn't have survived or even come into
existance.

Distributions also prove to the 'others'[1] that Linux _is_ making
progress and _is_ organised. If you were an IT Executive why on earth
would you put Linux on your servers if you had to build it from scratch?
It also gives bosses the (false) sense of security that they can blame a
company instead of themselves for problems.

Don't under rate the importance of Distributions. They are the key for
Linux's longterm survival in the IT World.

   - Andrew

-- 
Andrew Reid                   email: andrew.reid@plug.cx
                              www:   http://www.plug.cx
"If ignorance is bliss        phone: +61 401 946 813
 why aren't there more 
 happy people?"


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