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."

Comments

Real nice.

[sharkey]

Not only do we kill the Linux Counter when it is only 7 years old, now we violate Progeny's remains by /.'ing its obituary. What's next? Misspelling the name of a major character from a classic work of fantasy in an online poll?

Libranet is cutting back as well

[mkelley]

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-10 -03-015-20-NW-DB

product, not company

[SirEdward]

If you finish reading the article, you'll notice that they are simply no longer developing an alternative Debian distribution and will, instead, contribute their changes directly to the official Debian distribution. From the annoncement:

"From a business perspective, our customers consistently ask for Debian, not Progeny Debian, and while Progeny Debian is technically just a "release" of Debian (akin to "potato" or "woody" from the Debian project), the appearance of maintaining a separate or "forked" version is a liability given our company's shift away from a mass-market product and service focus and toward consulting and other professional services.

Progeny will continue to help further the development and adoption of Debian in commercial settings, and we will continue to contribute enhancements to Debian that help Debian become a more viable platform for commercial users. This announcement only affects Progeny Debian the product; it in no way affects Progeny's ongoing commitment to the Debian project or its Debian deployment, custom development, and support services for commercial users."

Re:product, not company

[Vagary]

So what's their business model now? Debian-specific consulting?

Re:product, not company

[big.ears]

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.)

Re:product, not company

[DeadPrez]

As far as I know, "vanilla" debian (and I can only assume this means potato) doesn't have most of those programs and the ones it does have are probably at least one major revision behind.

Installing potato *does* hurt in the sense that a large number of the apps are outdated (often time very severely) but in trade you get stability and security. Of course, you can always upgrade to testing (Woody) or unstable (Cid) but both are usually broken in such a way a *normal* user couldn't fix. That bums me out.

Debian, IMO, is dying for Woody to become stable. Until that happens, all the chest beating about how far linux and programs designed for linux have come will fall on deaf ears to the no/low risk Debian user and everyone else will be installing Red Hat. =(

Of course, the Debian community is doing the best the can, I just wanted to point out that "vanilla" Debian is a distro over 6 months old and really isn't a good choice for the programs you described unless you install them manually (which defeats the whole purpose of installing debian anyway!)

Re:product, not company

[DeadPrez]

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.

Re:product, not company

[PD]

Just remove the package, download the more up-to-date source, and compile it yourself. That's what I did with Abiword, and I'd hardly call it painful.

For 99% of everything, Debian is as up-to-date as I need it to be. I can compile everything else myself.

Re:product, not company

[big.ears]

By Vanilla, I meant not repackaged (by storm, progeny, or ximian.) My point was that the only way to use current software with Debian is to use Debian testing/unstable, which the repackaged versions generally don't support. So I'm glad that I can hire Progeny to support my 'vanilla' Debian installations, rather than only a 'Progeny' Debian install--because I'm not willing to to do that.

Re:product, not company

[be-fan]

Good for you. However, on my lowly machine (300MHz) everything takes too damn long to compile. If I just want to get a utility or something to do something quick, no way in hell am I going to wait 10 minutes for the damn thing to compile. Also, compiling KDE or GNOME on a slow machine is quite a challenge. You have to compile each component (kde-libs, kde-base) seperately, so you have to go to the trouble of writing a shell script to do it.

Re:product, not company

[PD]

In that case, I would laugh at the luser for not going with Mandrake or RedHat. Anybody who doesn't realize that beginners need to go with what everybody else is using gets what they deserve.

Re:product, not company

[PD]

I've got a 300MHz Celery and compiles are fast. I think you're just impatient if 10 minutes is too long to wait for a compile. It's not as bad as it was in the DOS days. You can background the process and do something else.

Not such a bad thing really

[gmack]

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)

Read the damn anouncement.

[Zapdos]

For all you id10ts out there they are not closing shop. They are merging with debian proper.

This announcement only affects Progeny Debian the product; it in no way affects Progeny's ongoing commitment to the Debian project or its Debian deployment, custom development, and support services for commercial users.

It makes sence.

[the_2nd_coming]

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.

Nooooo!!!!

[Darth RadaR]

I use Progeny Debian on my laptop and have never a *nix work so flawlessly, and able to detect *everything* on my old CTX 700E. I hope someone else keeps up the work they've been doing because, IMHO, Progeny Debian is a great distro.

Could someone mirror it?

[Error27]

It's an email so it's legal to mirror it.

Their site is slashdotted to all heck and back.

Re:It's inevitable

[Darth RadaR]

I don't think so. Every time you look around, there's a new distro out.

Project NOW

[DeadPrez]

The most intresting thing coming out of Progeny was Project NOW which earlier this year was cancelled. IMO, this was the killer app linux definately needed to stand head and shoulders above competitors, rather than continuing to compete based on (IMHO rather) trivial benchmark tests. I hope this some how allows Progeny to get back to working on NOW, which is the future for any corporate network OS, Linux, MS or otherwise.

The Progeny distribution, while having a nicer install for Debian wasn't really impressive enough to ever catch on. I suppose some people will miss it but I am pretty sure all involved (Debian Project, Progeny, and end users) will all benefit from decision to end the Progeny distro and have all efforts be put directly into Debian.

Re:Project NOW

[mindstrm]

Page unavailable.
What was NOW supposed to be, I forget.

Some kind of installation for an enterprise? Proper management of all stations, remote apps, mosix, etc?

Diversity is good!

[ChaoticCoyote]

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! ;)

Debian

[BlowCat]

Debian haber utilizado un nombre mejor para la distribucion.

Re:Debian

[Kiwi]

For those that cant read Spanish, "BlowCat" is saying that Debian has to have a better name.

- Sam

Bad Kharma

[SomeOtherGuy]

It seems very unlucky for the "Commercial Debian based distros" going belly up....Is it a curse or something????...Or maybe some serious gypsy curse or something....(your VC) is getting thinner, thinner, thinner...

My apoligies to all non Stephen King fans that did not get that one..

You mean...

[wiredog]

Catherine of Aragon isn't in Lord of the Rings?

Re:Can't make money off Debian

[SomeOtherGuy]

Not sure....But I bet that most distros are holding their breath and protesting against the spread of broadband and cd burners. Widepread availability of those 2 things together would take a big chunk of the customers. I have purchased distros just to show my support....(and then shelfed them shrinkwrap and all)...because I had already downloaded, burned, and installed...However, I find myself doing that less and less nowdays.

My take on Progeny.

[mindstrm]

I predicted this.
At the time it came out, progeny was great. Not worlds apart from debian.. but it was my preferred install.. (it was the best pick of the latest stuff, basically). I didn't think they would keep it up, or turn a profit though.

Merging with Debian Good!

[Dacmot]

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)

Long Live Debian!

[Jagasian]

Debian is the most open, standard Linux distribution, and by many standards, it is the best Linux distribution. Debian is not owned by a company, but instead it is developed by a wide variety of coders from all over the world.

When the dot-com market croaked, many Linux distributions had to let coders go, and some Linux distributions flat out died. This will never happen to Debian Linux because Debian is a different beast. Debian will always be here. Here to satisfy the practical computer user, and here to satisfy the open source puritan.

Progeny Linux isn't dying. In fact, it is going to a better place: pure Debian Linux... maybe even Woody. I like to think of it that Progeny Linux is going to the "heaven" of open source.

Its called "Gentoo Linux"...

[Jagasian]

The best of apt-get and BSD Ports, all for Linux:
http://www.gentoo.org/