Comments inline below: On Wednesday, October 15, 2014 06:37:57 Scott Ferguson wrote: > On 15/10/14 22:08, berenger.mo...@neutralite.org wrote: > > Le 15.10.2014 12:09, Brian a écrit : > >> On Wed 15 Oct 2014 at 10:41:12 +0200, berenger.mo...@neutralite.org > >> > >> wrote: > >>> Le 15.10.2014 09:11, Jonathan Dowland a écrit : > >>> >On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:51:07AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote: > >>> >>Check out what single company has 30% of the gatekeepers. Surprise, > >>> >>surprise. > >>> > > >>> >Damned for their success. We want Linux to be successful, but woe > >>> >betide any > >>> >company that actually gets us there... > >>> > >>> Maybe you want. > >>> But I think that most users just want it to work fine and > >>> efficiently, which does not necessarily imply being sold massively > >>> around the world. > > I would have 'thought' all users want "it" to be "useful" - but surely I > miss your point? (was there a point? I can only work with the words you > write and it reads like sophist rhetoric, assume the first nonsense is > not and it follows that neither is the second). As far as I'm aware > Debian has *never* been sold anywhere, nor are there plans to - did I > miss another meeting down the docks? > > >> He's doing some of the work on Debian; others work with different > >> distributions. They get what they want. Users get what they want. > >> Everyone's a winner. :) > > > > Maybe. But, when someone tries to sell stuff a lot, to have a big market > > share, then that guy must take a large target, which leads to systems > > which might become less stable or less efficient. And if that guy want > > to keep his market, then he'll have to avoid people escaping his stuff, > > this is why vendor locks exists. > > I could quote you Adam Smith on commerce and conspiracy - though I > seriously doubt he ever meant there are no non-business conspiracies. He > was smarter than that. > I used to run Red Hat on some of my servers. We paid RH for support. Years ago when I worked for Philips T & M we sold service contracts. The economic incentives for the seller are much the same as when you sell support. You make the most money when you supply the least support. That would give RH an economic incentive to make sure things are as reliable as possible. Businesses buy these contracts because they can not afford downtime. The upside for the business is they have a contract specifying a response. It is expensive to send folks out to fix stuff. Red Hat contributes a lot of patches. They pay people to work on the kernel. IBM employs the author of Postfix who provides support on the Postfix list. These companies are investing in Linux because it makes economic sense for them to have Linux as solid and reliable as possible.
We all benefit from these investments. > But it'd be more pertinent to note that servers cost money to run and > Debian (and the FSF) do a good job of not allowing any contributions in > labour or money to control it's production or direction. To allow the > former would be both foolish and ignore the nature of Free Open Source > Software. I can't think of any distro that doesn't accept assistance > from business. > With the possible exception of Hairshirtix (forked from > SelfFlagellantOS) but I'm pretty sure they haven't produced any actual > working code. ;) > > > Definitely, I hope that Debian won't take that road. > > Likewise, and I'm sure Intel don't want RedHat driving anymore than > RedHat want Google in control - even if IBM was prepared to let them, > and in the end it's still down to the programmers. And can only buy so > much with a paycheck. (last time I checked Linus gets paid to work on > the kernel). Another thing to note is that people have to eat. If companies like IBM and RH did not pay developers to work on Linux those people would have to work somewhere else. Maybe they would be at Google, Microsoft or Facebook. I have been hearing a lot of unwarranted chatter about the evils of the PID 1 replacement because Red Hat used. I do not hear so much about people pulling the patches contributed by Red Hat out of the kernel. All you people are accomplishing is raising the price of tinfoil. > > > It it does, then, > > I'll switch. I'm taking a look at netBSD, even if I guess that I'll have > > a hard time being successful in feeling as comfortable with it than with > > Debian. > > Here's a good place to start your "looking":- > http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/org/ > > Kind regards -- Mike McGinn KD2CNU Be happy that brainfarts don't smell. No electrons were harmed in sending this message, some were inconvenienced. ** Registered Linux User 377849
