From: "Ian Murdock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. With all the negative opinions about Linux around here, I'm surprised to have to say this, but: Multiple distributions without a reference for compatibility is *not* a feature of Linux we want to emulate! I know, I've spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to clean up the mess, with mixed results. It's far easier to create an ecosystem of compatible implementations if you *start* with a reference. All attempts at building a reference after the fact in Linux have been an abject failure.
I think this is the single most important argument in favor of a reference distro. Getting over the "OpenSolaris is the code base, while Nexenta blah blah" is mildly annoying. On the whole, though, the environment where Linux per se is not a distro has seen Linux flourish. I suspect a large part of the mind-share Open Solaris wants to win over is among the current Linux universe. It won't be a leap of understanding for them. A reference distro as the basis for compatibility is huge, however. Having run (unfortunately all too often) into projects that grew up on builds like Fedora that wouldn't function on RHEL, and into packages that I could only run/support on a Linux distro I wasn't using, it's enormously frustrating and made me question both the value of the platform and the wisdom of the people writing for a platform that clearly didn't work like users expected it to work. The ability to say "OpenSolaris Compatible" and know what that means -- whatever the community decides it means -- will be critically important to long term adoption. The technical advantages are clear, but if it's not crystal clear what I can use on a great platform, I don't have a great platform. If all I needed was an OS in a vaccuum, I'd be running OS/2 ;-) Rich
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