I hope no one gets angry at me for reviving this thread, but I'm just now reading it and I think this could be an important issue.
Christian Lavoie ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > My point is that this company would one day tries ot improve it's > revenues and influence the Debian distribution to fits its needs. Look > at the recent discussions about whether to ship Slink as i386 only, or > to wait until m68k and others are ready. If Debian had been > commercially distributed by a company, the choice wouldn't be taken on > a 'How can this help the Debian dists and end-users' basis, but on a > 'How can we get the most bucks' basis. > You're thinking in traditional terms. Someone decides these issues now, right? Those exact same people would be in charge of this corporation. They would not be interested in the bottom line, but in what's best for Debian. The word "corporation" scares a lot of people because of what it's come to represent. But how a corporation is run is decided internally. Just because there aren't any democratic corporations doesn't mean we can't start one. This new democratic Debian corporation could sell shrink-wrapped Debian CDs right next to Red Hat CDs, hopefully cheaper. Combined with Debian's advantages over Red Hat and word-of-mouth, Debian could possibly eclipse Red Hat. Even if it doesn't become the best-selling distro, it could still sell enough to give the developer's jobs. I'm not sure if this would be considered a for-profit corporation or not. No one's really raking in any profit, most of the money is going back into Debian and paying for the packaging and such, but some people are getting paid, so I'm not sure. I can see only two changes in Debian due to this corporation. Development would (presumably) go faster because the developers are getting paid, and Debian would become more well-known. I also liked the idea that someone suggested earlier, that people could pay dues into this corporation and get a vote. A democratic corporation indeed. This may sound radical, but we'll never know if it will work unless we try, will we? /----------------------------------------------------------\ | pretzelgod | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | (Eric Gillespie, Jr.) | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | |---------------------------<*>----------------------------| | "That's the problem with going from a soldier to a | | politician: you actually have to sit down and listen to | | people who six months ago you would've just shot." | | --President John Sheridan, Babylon 5 | \----------------------------------------------------------/
