[TriLUG] self-support alternatives to Novell/SUSE & RHEL

[Andrew Perrin]

Not that I want to start a distro war, but what's wrong with Debian?

ap

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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu


On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Magnus wrote:

> It's becoming increasingly apparent that the community needs an
> RPM-based distro that is community driven rather than profit driven.
> Profit isn't a bad thing, and I wish Red Hat & Novell well in their
> commercial ventures, but their business models do not serve
> self-supporting shops.  Many orgs have been winging it with Red Hat
> Linux (the consumer distro) and have expressed a lack of confidence in
> the Fedora Project.
>
> While this project doesn't perfectly meet my needs either, I've started
> participating in the cAos-el project ( http://www.caosity.org/ ) which
> is basically taking RHAS 2.1 and augmenting it from there.  I'm
> personally working on a related project, based on RHEL 3 (for those of
> you that were following in IRC last night, I've got about 1,000 binary
> RPM's done now).  Anyway the goal is to have an umbrella organization
> for packaging up an enterprise class distribution with long life
> cycles.  There is considerable financial support coming from some big
> names to make this project happen.
>
> I've only just signed on yesterday so I don't know all the ins and outs
> of the project yet.  I'm just raising it as one alternative to all of
> the whining aimed at Red Hat (and now Novell) which I too am guilty of.
>   There is already quite a lot of activity in this distro, despite what
> the sparse web site would suggest, so check out the mailing lists & IRC
> channel to learn more.
>
> I know with Windows we weren't empowered to do much more than b*tch
> when we were handed changes that we didn't like.  This is Open Source.
> Each and every one of us is empowered to fix things we don't like.
>
> --
>
> C. Magnus Hedemark
> http://trilug.org/~chrish
> "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not
> bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -
> Mark Twain
>