On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 11:09 AM, jtd<[email protected]> wrote: > It is more about companies relying on legal innovation rather than business > and technical innovation.
Agreed. > In the case of FLOSS companies, the simple act of separating the closed bits > on a different media, with whatever licence one deems fit, would remove all > ambiguities. Fedora has a couple of packages which include branding into the distro. Replacing them with generic branding packages is all it takes to spin up a new distro based on Fedora. It is probably not as simple in RHEL, but I am guessing it is simple enough for CentOS to exist. > Infact in this case making it mandatory to make an EXACT facsimile for copying > and redistribution including the artwork, would ensure plenty of free > publicity to RH. Why do you think companies handout freebies? > What do you think Canonical is doing? It's very smart marketing by Canonical. And they're not making any profits yet. IIRC, this is what Red Hat was doing in its earlier days and they just did not seem to be making money despite all the mindshare. Businesses need money to survive, not just mindshare. > What came to the top of my mind when i thought of ditching Debian? it was > Canonical (mono in ubuntu is another story though). RH has been around > longer, but IMO it's Canonical which has mindshare, by the simple act of > encouraging copying. > And as far as contributions go, you do not see too many Ubuntu contributions upstream compared to Red Hat, IBM or even Novell. Sustainability of FOSS is in upstream, not some distro. So if Ubuntu dies tomorrow, Mandriva will be back as the "Linux for newbies". Or maybe some other distro. It will not affect the larger FOSS ecosystem all that much. -- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.in -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
