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Progeny Debian Is No More
Nickus writes: "According to this announcement on the Progeny homepage, development of their Progeny Debian has stopped and will no longer be available for sale after 15th of October. They will provide a migration path to the next release of Debian though."
While it's sad to see another player leave the field this will make it easier for the others to make a profit. Right now there are too many distros fighting over too few users and we could stand to lose a coupple more.
Having said that, I would still like to see someone else other than just RedHat actually make money at this. (congrats to them but we need some long term competition)
Ian made Progeny to make Debian more simple to install, most of the stuff that sold progeny will be included in Woody so why go with progeny and why split the code. having a comercial side to the Debian project it self is more appealing to me. it will give Debian more market consiousness while not infecting the rest of the project.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Truthfully, this is going to happen again and again in the next few years until the field is dwindled to a few or possibly just one distribution is left. I just hope Mandrake is included. With the state of all things economic there jsut isn't the room for all of these distributions in the financial sense of the word room. Sad thing, but true...just part of capitolism and how it works however.
Derek Greene
Derek Greene
That's good news. I cut my teeth on Storm and Progeny, but quickly found that they were unable to provide a current distribution, and switched to vanilla debian. At least in today's software environment, using a 6-month-old distribution is painful. Just think of all the software that has gone from nearly unusable to excellent in the last 6 months: Mozilla, OpenOffice, gnumeric, dia, sodipodi, Abiword, evolution, nautilus, galeon, and gnucash on the Gnome side, and just about everything on the KDE side has made improvements as well (although they weren't as unusable as Gnome 6 months ago.)
No, it's trying to make money of a free product.
Remember the underpants gnomes on Southpark? Their business model was:
1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Profit
Seems a lot like the Linux business model.
Diversity is the engine of evolution; ergo, a sign of a healthy Linux is multiple distributions meeting different needs. Natural selection will weed out the weak, while the survivors will settle into niches both great and small.
Right now, everybody and their dog seems to have a Linux distro... just check out DistroWatch for the states of 36 different distros around the planet.
If Progeny's niche had merit, another distro will come along and fill the void. If it had no merit (and I don't know, not having used it), then its passing allows energy to flow to stronger distros.
Boy, that sounds New-Agey! ;)
All about me
That isn't a logical fallacy at all. Old apps != insecure apps. Old apps w/ security holes == insecure apps.
Big difference. The thing about Debian is that when a distro goes stable, they would rather back port any security fixes to the older version rather than upgrade. Silly? Perhaps a bit, but it does keep the stable version stable.
I've never used Progeny, but I've tried to get Debian on machines of many people who wanted to try Linux for the first time. Installing Potato requires quite of bit of knowledge about the hardware of a particular computer before *starting* to install. It's nice to hear that debian will be getting an easier installation program. Definetly a good thing to show that linux isn't *that* scary :o)