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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health
phreakuencies writes "The ChangeLog in slackware-current got a distiguished update today on Jan 22: Patrick Volkerding updated us on his health condition stating he is not back in perfect shape but getting more medical tests and results. The initial phrase on the ChangeLog: 'I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.' Read up here"
Slackware got mostly replaced by Gentoo on its position of "zealot distro", but Gentoo+Portage requires helluva horsepower under the hood unless you want to wait a week for OpenOffice upgrade. Slackware still is a viable choice for everyone who wants to learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
slackware *IS* a commercial distro, and mostly an one man show.
:)
a lot of people forget that very often
in ultra small businesses(1 or 2 people) the health of the people in it is actually pretty important to know for the clients..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hmmm I think the benevolent dictator argument is a good one, but you forget one think. As democracy protects us (in principle) against politicians going corrupt after getting elected, so does the GPL protect us from benevolent dictators going bad..
If the 'people' no longer wish to live under the benevolent dictators rule, then they can just pack up the 'country' (=software) and start one of their own. If the rest of the people agree that the dictator has gone corrupt, then they will flock to the new distribution, leaving the old corrupt dictator with nothing to rule over.
So I don't think giving health reports in a changelog is going to have the people up in arms.
I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.
However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.
In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.
As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.
This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees /and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.
That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.
This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.
In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.
So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"
Stefan Axelsson
but I wonder: assuming he has to pay for medical care (I'm British, sorry) - I hope he makes enough money from this project to adequately cover these costs.
Here is my real beef - I love open source, but it pisses me off when I speak to people in business when they talk about free software in terms of monetary cost. I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.
Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.
Sorry folks, rant over...
I'd go further than that, since Slackware is his one-man-show baby, people who use it are very much interested in both his health and what will happen if the worst comes to the worst.
A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus. That was actually a reason not to adopt Linux. Now we all know that people like Andrew Morton and Alan Cox are available and experienced.
What way would people go if Slackware went down the tubes? Debian? I know I found Red Hat incredibly frustrating when my ignorance and Unix inexperience meant I had to leave Slackware and move to something easier to configure. In the end it was SuSE 5.0 I turned to, it's PCnfs printing capabilities worked 'out of a box'. Not sure I'd see SuSE as a migration path for Slackware users nowadays though.
Get well soon.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Dude, cut Pat some slack (no pun intended). He only put his health update in the changelog because it is the most effective way of getting the word out to the Slackware community. Pat doesn't really have a blog, so the changelog is the next best thing.
But since Slackware doesn't offer OpenOffice packages, you have no choice but to compile. I use both (3 slackware boxes, 1 gentoo). They each have their merits to us zealots.
In many ways this is one of the major intents behind the GPL: The GPL means you never have to put your faith in someone else when you use someone else's software. You are not limited by them. You are not giving them your testicles and a large hammer whenever you trust your data to something they wrote. Normally it's phrased in the conspiracy-driven language I just used, but it applies equally to situations where the reason for that lack of support could be entirely honest and unforseen, like Pat's situation today.
And on that note, may I wish Pat the best of luck. Whatever I move on to, Slackware will always have a soft spot for me, both as the first distro I used, and as the one that worked closest to the way I want such a distro to work. Slackware is a work of art.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
at least Pat could put a "donations" link in the site
Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).
From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.
Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization? In my experience CMM is bullshit anyway. The reason projects usually required heroic efforts wasn't immature, non-predictable development processes, but because project requirements changed throughout development, and deadlines weren't moved to match. If you know what you're building and you have good craftsmen with experience estimating project timeframes, it's not terribly hard to do.
And no, stuff like XP doesn't help when your sales people change their minds about what's critical regularly as they find another client potentially willing to part with a half million bucks if only we have feature X. Those clients never actually parted with their money, I found - feature X as a roadblock was almost always a bullshit excuse, and when we pulled a week of all-nighters to demo feature X, it never actually closed a deal.
Portage doesn't need that much horsepower, just leave it on overnight. I can't do that, but 4 hours a day is quite enough to keep my 800mhz Duron up to date (and it has pretty much everything major installed). nice -n 19 emerge -u world, then your system is just as responsive and it's upgrading. Slackware is still a nice distro, but its lack of a dependency manager hurts it.
I am trolling
Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
No, in a commercial product they would just put advertisements in their changelog.
Maybe. IF they allow you to continue to see doctors after the first says there is nothing they can do. IF there is enough money to pay for the tests you need. (Of course if it is life or death it is done, but we do the work here in that case too, when the condition isn't that serious though there may be lines)
Its all a maybe. There are many people in Canada who come to the US for treatment because it is better. You pay for it, but you get better treatment. The reverse is also true because for some things it is better to live under a system like Canada.