Patrick Volkerding Interviewed by The Age

boa13 writes "The Age, a major newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, has published an interview with Patrick Volkerding, The Man behind Slackware. Covered are the early history of Slackware, its business model, its current state, Patrick's plans for the future and his opinion about the commercialisation of Linux. "

Comments

Sick Sad World

[gorjusborg]

From the Article: "I don't have a problem with commercial versions of Linux (Slackware is one, after all). My main concern is that everyone plays by the rules, and I've heard about things (like binary only releases and beta testers forced to sign non-disclosure agreements) that just don't seem compatible with the GNU General Public License. Hopefully the Free Software Foundation is keeping a close eye on the situation."

I hear many fl4mz0rs spouting off about how this distro 'blows' and this other one '0wnz0rz', etc. And many times their beef with the distrobutions is that they cater to the mainstream (Windows?) users, rather than to the old-school-bloatless-speedfreak user.

I just want to clear this up for any fl4mz0rz listening. GNU/Linux will not ever be ruined by any company who releases a distrobution.
Anyone can make a linux distrobution, and because of this, if you ever see that all the distrobutions of linux are heading down the road to Redmond, you can learn (now thats a novel idea) how to make your own (if it's important enough to you). The atrocities mentioned abover are not good practice for companies, but do not hurt the GNU/Linux community very much because educated users will not support companies who do them.

Re:Slackware is GREAT! (depending...)

[doodleboy]

It also happens to be the best one, but that's another stuff.

I really like slackware's simplicity. For those of us who manually configure everything anyway, slack is the simplest, the fastest, the most stable, etc. Even better, the powerful installer allows you to cram it onto the smaller disks popular in older computers. It's really excellent for small servers and firewalls using otherwise useless hardware.

But I don't think slackware is for everyone. Linux is going to see huge growth in the next couple of years, and the n00bs can't reasonably be expected to do everything from a command line. There is a place for the relatively bloated redhats and mandrakes of the world that automagically work in (nearly) every case. If you were just getting started with linux, which would you prefer?

A best-of-both-worlds type compromise: slackware and webmin. Small, fast, stable, with an easy web-based configurator.

Slack's great, but package management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much as I love Slack, and use it several times a day, it's a shame that there's no native package management tools. Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.

I know that Slack has .tgz tarballs which work in a similar way, but they have trouble retaining the metadata and fine-grained dependency stacking information that an easily-upgradable package management system provides.

I'll still keep using Slack, but I can only hope that they develop a superior package system, or at least do a proper Ports implementation.

Just my 2 cents. Mod down if offtopic :)

Re:Slack's great, but package management?

[schon]

Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.

And all of them lose, hands down, when compared to Slackware's package management.

Slackware's package management (and yes, it IS package management) conforms to the principles on which Unix is based.

Instead of one (nonstandard, multifunction) tool, Slackware uses standard command line tools, such as grep, ls, and cat. These are commands that every sysadmin already knows. The package database is a list of plain text files, not a binary mishmash (I've seen Redhat people bitch about the Windows registry, and how plain text files in /etc/ are much easier to deal with, but they miss the point that they're married to the exact same concept with the RPM database.)

Ever had the RPM database become corrupt on a Redhat box?

How about if the RPM command itself gets hosed?

If you have, you'll appreciate the simplicity of Slack's system. If not, pray that you never do.

Re:Slack's great, but package management?

[VB]

A good package management system doesn't necessarily need to include a plethora of automated utilities that allow you to forget how to be a system administrator. RPM actually discourages thorough knowledge of your system in the same way M$ approaches updates / "package management." With RH, you'll eventually need to reboot (unless you're very good; but the distro discourages you from being very good).

I've upgraded glibc on a slackware server 2000 miles away before without a reboot. And, yes it worked just fine for another couple hundred days until I got on a plane and traveled to where it was so I could get it.

People put way too much emphasis on package management. I prefer to maintain my own as closely as possible. Creates much less work in the long run...

Re:Slackware is good

[evalhalla]

Debian is more what GNU/Linux is meant to be :)

Re:Patrick Volkerding is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is it with you ESR groupies? Volkerding created and still maintains a cool Linux
distribution, Bruce Perens wrote some cool software...
and ESR wrote a fucking LIST? Now, who's the odd man out here?
Is this a gay thing? Er, sorry to burst your bubble, dude,
but Raymond hates fags.