Social Contract Amendment May Bump Sarge To 2005

An anonymous reader submits "Debian's Release Manager Anthony Towns announced that after the Grand Resolution to amend the Social Contract has been successful (it does not only apply to software any more), vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed from the distribution before the next release. Moreover, the upcoming installer will need to be changed. He goes on to say that he does not expect this to happen by the end of this year which means that Sarge will not be released in 2004."

Comments

Debian is fading into irrelevence?

[ObviousGuy]

With its stable releases already years behind the curve (still using 2.4 kernel!), Debian shows off again how it is willing to buck the trend of newer and better by demanding that functionality be *taken out* of the distribution.

Luckily for Debian, its main competitor, Gentoo, just lost its leader and so the mass migration away from the dated distro will most likely be stemmed before it can begin.

Meanwhile, businesses serious about Linux are still using Redhat Fedora as their OS.

Re:Debian is fading into irrelevence?

[sn00ker]

I'd still like to see a complete OS with apps that all use licenses that aren't picky about what they link to, who's making money, or whether or not Microsoft gets to benefit from open-source innovations

So, what you're really saying is that you want to use FreeBSD! Seriously, most of the apps that ship are under the BSD licence, with a few exceptions - GCC being the most obvious one, but since GCC is pretty loosy-goosey in its licence, who cares? The only other biggies are the office suites, and Evolution. Most other stuff you can find software which uses the FreeBSD licence, or something similarly open.

FWIW, the GPL is not a "free" licence, only an open one. You are not allowed to do with GPL'd software as you wish, which does not fit the dictionary definition of free. Technically the BSD licence isn't either, but attribution is a heck of a lot closer than the GPL will ever get.
And, yes, I do understand the negative side of the BSD licence, but I still think it is the "free-er" of the two choices.

"Grand Resolution" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough* more charming Open Source elitism. Ya don't see Microsoft releasing announcements like "Following consultation with the Grand Poobar, a Greater Council Desicion was reached to sh*t all over Lindows". Fark.

Re:Rock solid stability

[rufey]

I am curious: are you still getting bugfixes and security updates for your redhat 7 systems? It seems hard to believe that someone still maintains the package tree for distributions that old, especially since redhat itself seems to have abandoned them.

We probably are not as concerned about bug-fixes and security updates as we should be, and this is a problem with old versions of distros. I mean you can no sooner do an upgrade of some Linux distro than you find out that the version you upgraded to is going to be EOL'ed in the next year, and the vendor recommends you upgrade yet again just to keep up (and get support).

We don't do security updates on a regular basis on our older RedHat servers simply because, support for those versions are hard to find anymore. Most of them don't even face the Internet (you'd have to break in elsewhere first), and we mostly use java/tomcat/apache/Oracle downloaded (and upgraded on a needs basis) from their respective vendors and don't rely on RedHat to keep us up to date with the apps we use. If we find a bug that needs to be fixed, it has always been with the third-party vendor supplied software, not RedHat.

If RedHat were Debian, I bet that v7.2 would still be the stable release - which means we'd still have full support...