----- Original Message -----
From: "David Irvine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 11:39 PM
Subject: [scottish] Distros
> Would anybody be interested in building/marketing a
> custom distro?
>
> Thoughts
What benefits would this distro offer over all the others out there? What
case do you have for building it? Can you see a market for your distro that
hasn't already been captured by an existing product? If you intend to
market your distro, think of the business cases for people to purchase it in
addition to the technical reasons. If you don't want to aim at the business
market, what do you want it to do? Remember that others are working on Joe
Shmoe easy-to-install distros (think Mandrake for one).
You need to properly think through _why_ you want to do it before you think
_how_ you're going to do it. If you end up cloning Debian or Mandrake,
no-one will be interested.
A more important question though - do we really need another distro to be
'competing' against RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Turbo, Slackware, Storm, SuSE,
Caldera, Stampede, Phat, Rock, Connectiva, Dragon, Gentus, WinLinux, Tiny,
Peanut, Flight, Chainsaw, DLX, GCL, Armed, Yggdrasil, Redmond, etc ... ???
And I haven't even mentioned distros for other architectures ... (hello
MkLinux, PPCLinux, UltraPenguin ...)
IMHO the market for a vanilla workstation or server distro is sewn up. If
you can conclusively and comprehensively answer the first questions, and you
can truthfully say "YES" to the last question, then I wish you luck.
But the Linux distro market is basically led by RedHat for a commercial
distro and Debian for a free distro. The way into this market is by
building 'niche' distros to achieve particular tasks, such as SmoothWall
(who I'm working with just now), LRP, hal91, tomsrtbt, etc.
just my tuppence ...
--
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