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

[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.)

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.

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.

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.

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)