On 2013-11-20 14:49:34, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: > On Wed, November 20, 2013 19:03, anarcat wrote >> I see your point, although I think there is a few orders of magnitudes >> between adding improvements to the current mirror infrastructures versus >> soldering PCBs... > > Debian's core activity is building the best OS in the world. Distributing > the actual result of that is, at least in my opinion, a thing very > peripheral to that activity. The fact that Debian has always shied away > from making CD's and distrbuting those to users but rather left that to > commercial and non-commercial parties, indicates that this is not a novel > development. > > We allow (and promoted) commercial CD services. I see delivery over the > network not as a fundamentally different thing than delivery on CD. It's > not the thing Debian is necessarily good at. Let us concentrate on the OS > building.
Hosting mirrors wasn't our core activity either 20 years ago, yet we had
to distribute this thing somehow. I would argue that distributing
Debian, regardless of the mechanism (CDNs, mirror infrastructure, CDs)
is as much part of making the software real as pushing packages to
ftp-master...
>> which are based on a spirit of free access and open knowledge, something
>> commercial CDNs seem to be alien to...
>
> I have not seen any indication that commercial CDN's would necessarily be
> "alien" to "free access and open knowledge", in fact, it would seem rather
> contrary to their nature to hinder access to content.
To take an example of one of the proposed CDNs, Amazon has been actively
destroying data on people's e-readers, 1984 of all books. This would
qualify as simply hostile.
I would also point out that none of the CDNs *publish* the software they
develop as free software. They may *use* free software, but they built
their business on proprietary software on top of our hard work.
That is what I meant.
A.
--
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
- Wirth's law
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