Debian vs 'commercial' distrobutions, was: Re: [ox-en] Patents and Copyright, but what about other Exclusive Property Rights/Trademarks? (Was: RedHat and Fedora and SuSE and Novell)
- From: Chris Croome <chris croome.net>
- Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 15:36:52 +0000
Hi
On Fri 07-Nov-2003 at 05:23:52AM -0500, Graham Seaman
wrote:
IMO the problems with commercial Linux distributions
(eg. SUSE, RedHat) are not legal but technical -
tweaking the contents or distribution systems so it
takes more than the necessary work to switch from them
to someone else, etc. Which is not only a problem for
coders, but also end-users: go too far down the
RedHat/SUSE road, and they may find they are as little
enabled by running Linux as they were by running M$.
Use Debian.
I think this is a very interesting discussion -- where
does the power really reside in projects like this?
On the one hand there is hierarchical command structures
of capital, however in cases like Fedora, Mozilla and
OpenOffice the day-to-day running of the projects has
been spun-off into semi-autonomus organisations.
Then there is the formal leadership of the projects (eg
the Fedora steering committee [1]) but it is my experience
that, like the hierarchical structures of capital these
don't really matter so much either -- they only matter if
there is a big row and things get pushed to votes, but
then the ability to fork projects puts a massive
restriction on this power.
Where the real power and decision making lies is on the
central lists of the project, for example I was reading a
thread yesterday on the dates for Fedora 2 [2] and it
seems fairly clear to me that, to a large extent, the
developers are in the driving seat here, and having a
@redhat.com email address doesn't really matter all that
much.
I think it makes sense for the organisation of _most_
things to be done on open email lists and then at some
point the slogan "all power to the lists" might be one
that makes sense ;-)
Chris
[1] http://fedora.redhat.com/about/leadership.html
[2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2003-November/thread.html#00219
--
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