King Lee wrote:
>
> On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, eric Farris wrote:
> > A point that should be brought up here, i think, is what the user stands
> > to gain from a MS-ish distribution of Linux. A MS-Linux distro would be
> > (1) overpriced, (2) underpowered, (3) buggy, and (4) popular. RH, from
> > my explorations, fits this definition.
> >
> > So RH gets to "become the definition of Linux," so what? unlike the
>
> <snip>
>
> No problem with me provided that third party non-free software,
> i.e., Oracle, Infomax, etc are easily ported to Debian, FBSD,
> NetBSD, Slackware, etc.
In the short term, this may not be too much of a problem. The
long term view, however, of a market dominated by 'MS-Linux' will
be much grimmer. At some point, RH would make it harder and
harder for app developers to support more than one distro.
The issue is not that the Linux kernel would still be available
as open-source, the problem is what happens when 85-95% of app
developers are writing their software only for RH. The 'open
source' community would not be terribly affected, and would
certainly continue support of Debian and others, but if RH can
wrap up the commercial side of the Linux phenomenon, Debian will
never go much farther than it is now.
>
> Different distros offer different adminstrative tools, and different
> packages. Distros offering different administrative tools is a good
> thing IMHO; the tools for newbies should be different than
> for the guru. However, if I want to run Oracle,
> I do not want to have to switch to RH.
>
> If third party software vendors (that do not provide source)
> had a tree (like teTeX) and have envionmental variables point to parts
> of tree, it seems that any distro can easily include the software
> in a packge. Is it that simple? If so, are the vendors doing this?
>
> King Lee
>
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--
Ed C.
