Re: Hrm...

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On 18 Mar 1998 jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:

> Debian being an exercise of programmers for programmers everyone can
> see it.
> 
> About Debian small user base.  It is greatly exagerated in the message
> but it is basically true: for a confirmation remember than Infomagic
> no longer includes it.  Bruce Perens told as it was at Debian 's
> initiative because "Infomagic was getting it all wrong".

Well, the mailing lists are of no consequense because a lot of the
readership has gone to following them by Usenet.

And Infomagic DID screw up by burning a development distro before it was
ready and trying to ship it as 1.0 which caused debian to have to
introduce the first real release as 1.1 to keep from confusing people.

> When he told that I kept silence being curious to see who in this list
> would dare call him a liar.  First because I have seen Debian
> distributions of _three_ _different_ sources and _all_ had _serious_
> bugs and each time the Debian people rejected the fault on the
> manufacturer.  A little too systematic to my taste.

No, all three of these were, I think, burned before the official release
date of the software in an attempt to be the first one out. At least that
is the case in TWO of the cases and was the reason behind producing the
"official" CDROM.

> Second: Because Debian is supposed to be GPL so had Infomagic been
> interested they were in their right to tell Debian people to get lost
> and include the Debain distribution in their Developper's Resource.
> Add than people like Stallman would had reacted strongly about any
> hint of a Debian veto on Infomagic.

It is one thing include a distribution, it is quite another to include a
work-in-progress and present it as a finished product.  THAT was debian's
complaint.  Debian said that 1.0 was not ready, Infomagic burned it anyway
and burned a lot of people in the process.

> 
> The truth is than the Infomagic people were no longer interested
> because they had noticed Debian was not particularly good for sales:
> the Debian tribe makes much noise but is a small one.

Of course it wasn't when you include a bad version! It does not take long
for people to decide that it was junk and for word to get around.


> 
> Therefore Infomagic included Suse instead of Debian and Perens lied to
> save face.

That could be, Bruce gets weird when he gets angry.  I have never seen him
like he is now, though.  There is something else going on. I do not know
what it is but it is something else.  He posted today that his position is
being converted from SGI machines to NT and he will be looking for another
job soon.  I think (but do not know this) that he is unsure of his
commercial support venture and could not get enough developers on-board to
provide commercial support.  This is not surprising since many are
students and the combination of studies, continuing development, and
providing support is simply too much for them to commit to.

It is also odd that he posted two weeks ago that he would have a signed
agreement from a commercial company for Debian support within a day or two
and two weeks have gone by without any word.

As for CDROM's since debian created the "official" cdrom, which is free,
and provided exact instructions on how to create CDROM sets, I have heard
of no major troubles.

George Bonser 
Just be thankful that Microsoft does not manufacture pharmaceuticals.
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.

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