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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
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
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.