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UserLinux Proposal (And Analysis) Now Available
Lucky writes "Bruce Peren's idea for UserLinux was much discussed on Slashdot some weeks ago; however, there was no formal proposal. Linuxworld is running an analysis of the proposal and links to the first draft."
I'm not stuck on the UserLinux name, and would listen to alternatives. I proposed gnUserLinux, but RMS didn't like it! He feels that having the GNU up front would signify that it's an FSF official project. UserGNULinux doesn't roll off of the tongue quite as easily.
I'm wondering why these ideas just can't be incorporated by the Debian project itself. They have a desktop subproject, why not just rally around the Debian banner ?
"Based on Debian" is great, but why not convince the project itself that this is the direction to go? Wouldn't this do nothing but improve the distribution? Who would be against that?
I think part of the point of UserLinux, and standards in general, is just to tip the scales when less involved developers make choices.
When I'm developing software I frequently come to a decision point where there's multiple protocols, implementations, or standards I can support. I often (usually!) don't care about which one I use, so long as it's not insanely bad. For example, I don't care where my program's files go, so long as I can find them. I don't care what port I use, so long as it doesn't conflict with other programs. I don't care about the file format, but it would be nice if other tools could handle it. And so on.
Standards make it easy to make a decision in these cases. Because lots of decisions are important but not useful. Let a standard committee figure it out for me -- whatever important details there are that I don't understand, they can think about those. And when they are done, they don't have to present a justification of why they are right -- they just have to tell me, the developer, what I'm supposed to do.
Competition can be useful. But only when it's interesting. I know, things that are interesting to one person aren't interesting to another. I don't care about exim vs. postfix vs. qmail, but I'm sure there are people who care very much. I guess part of a standard is a way of making both of those possible -- making it so I don't have to care (because they all talk SMTP) while another person can make decisions that are useful to them. Of course, SMTP is only a start -- I like /etc/aliases too, because it's easy to understand, but it's also limited. A growing standard might extend that -- and well it should, because having a single way to express aliases would be very useful. In this way a standard can grow, and slowly pick off the pieces where useful diversity doesn't exist (only annoying diversity).
I think UserLinux could be successful if it finds low hanging fruit first -- standardizing boring things, where the participants are easy to convince. There might be things that are more useful to standardize (like a GUI toolkit), but down that road leads certain failure.
Richard Stallman thinks so, which is why he opposes proprietary software. No proprietary software, no problem. This is where Richard and I differ somewhat. I think that proprietary software and Free Software should exist together on a level playing field. And personally I am much more interested in working on Free Software.
The Troll Tech folks chose (with a great deal of prodding) to use a GPL + commercial dual-licensing model. They do this so that they can support their families while making good Free software. This is something that we can respect. They don't have to facilitate proprietary software while making the free stuff. They can choose to make money off of proprietary developers.
The only question in my mind is whether we need to make the same choice. Somehow, GNOME (or should I say GTK) got made without dual-licensing.
You may be trying to say something in favor of BSD-like licensing. In that case, I think you should consider that this argument has two sides, and that it is too often seenn only from the standpoint of the person who recieves free software, rather than the person who creates it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
apt-get install --file
Sometimes you want to install a .deb that doesn't exist in any repository, but depends on packages in Debian. apt-get won't help you, so you use dpkg --install. But dpkg doesn't satisfy dependencies so you have to do it yourself.
It seems to me that apt-get is missing a simple and useful feature. Am I missing something?
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.