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

Re:Patrick Volkerding is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Bruce was doing cool stuff before Linux was invented. Bruce developed Electric Fence memory
debugger on Sun gear, and later ported it to Linux.

ESR was the world's expert on Unix for Intel IA32 hardware, long before Linux was invented.
He maintained the definitive Usenet list of i386 Unix. He personally tested and reviewed them all.

Before Slackware, my first association with Patrick Volkerding was when he took up a collection to help Linus Torvalds financially when Linus was still a student. Patrick collected several thousand dollars in dontations for Linus, and very penny of it went to Linus. Very cool.

I like all these guys. If they weren't doing Linux, they'd be doing something else equally fine.

Thanks Patrick for making me learn

[YJ87]

Here is my experience with slackware.

The first linux CD i had was Slack 2.0 in the fall of 1995 and the Windows partition survived only 2 days. I can't say it was the easiest distro to work with but it forced me to buy the Linux bible and RTFM to get it working.

The memory of having my first X-session after hacking modelines etc for 2 days .......Now all my machines run Slackware ( including my Sony VAIO XG18). When i got my Sun E250 last month , it took me only 2 hours to get it all set up with Solaris 9 ( Having NEVER worked on Solaris at an admin Level ). All this because i did not have a automagic install and had to learn/piece it all together.

Keep the good work going Patrick.

YJ87

His business model looks sound to me

[Gerry Gleason]

If you actuall read everything in the article, you would know he had some venture capitalists sniffing around. By keeping it small and not having a big marketting staff to support, he has kept it going through the lean times.

The VCs will give you money to expand, but then if the climate turns, they might not be willing to keep funding. Now you have made lots of commitments to customers, employees and supliers that you just can't keep up.

About three years back I got a great job with a dotcom just when they got funded by a VC. By the end of the year, the company had doubled in size and by the next spring they had to lay off about half of the current staff. When I shook hands with the CEO on my way out I could tell he was very sad that he had let all of us down this way. The CTO that I reported too couldn't even look me in the face, but that's another story. Recently I heard the were absorbed by the VC and pretty much closed up their operation.

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

[GRH]

I really like slackware's simplicity. I agree. Myself, I went from DOS to slackware (in the 1.2 kernel days). Configuration flipped from editing autoexec.bat/config.sys to rc.d files.

Using slackware in those early days made me LEARN how the whole system works (since, like today, there are no GUI tools for anything). Over time I've tried most of the other distros, but I keep coming back to slack because I know what file to edit to get the job done.

Don't get me wrong, GUI tools are great and are required to bring Linux to a larger audience. However, they never quite have the flexibility, and at times are unusable (shell only).

My question for the /. crowd would be why someone chooses Debian over slack or vice versa. I'm not trying to start a "which is better" war, but although I've tried Debian, I keep coming back to slack.

Once you go Slack, you never go back

[Sp4c3 C4d3t]

I've been using Slack for about 2 years now. I've tried various other distributions (Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo), but I just love Slack so much I can never leave it. It's the way Linux was meant to be... I know exactly where everything is, and my filesystem isn't dirty like with the rest of the distros.

I'm glad to see something like this getting some press... keeps me knowing that Slack is still going strong, despite what some trolls like to say. (Slackware has no money left!)

On a side note, who needs a package manager? I never use packages, except when installing the distro... compiling is better :B. I guess Joe Sixpack isn't really into that idea, but hey, Slack's not for everyone.