Debian Not Looking For Commercial Fortune

Geoffery writes "Some analysts foresee a less than rosy future for projects such as Debian, claiming free coding is all well and good, but that without a solid financial backing — such as the models adopted by Red Hat and to a greater degree Novell/Suse — Debian will ultimately hit a brick wall. ZDNet interviews Steve McIntyre, the new man leading the organization on issues of 'community registrations' and future plans."

Comments

Non-profit group does not seek profit

[Daishiman]

News at 11.

They Could Make a Shuttle's Worth of Money

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If only they could agree on who "They" were. :-)

Heck, with some old sid packaging contibutions, I am a "They".

Don't f*ck with Deb. You'll bring down six or seven other distros downstream.

What the OSS haters forget

[SilentBob0727]

As long as there are people who are looking for a challenge and want to write code for the fun of it, there will always be open source software.

I read through TFA

[guruevi]

Apparently the only person that thinks non-commercial Linux development is a bust is the reporter from ZD Asia. The interviewed thinks about it totally different although 3 questions border on that subject and one is even somewhat insulting, Steve keeps hammering that this is a non-profit and they've been doing it like that for 15 years. There is no "problem" here as the interviewer makes it out to be.

Really bad summary. Debian is Rocking.

[gnutoo]

The article itself is far more positive than the description. No one but the submitter is questioning Debian's future. The interview asked some pointed questions and was obviously impressed with the answers as the first paragraph or two show.

The Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues to generate interest from developers around the world, keen to sign up and contribute code to the open-source project now in its 15th year. But this popularity has been a mixed blessing. The project came under fire recently when programmers who wanted to get on board were unable to sign up and become registered participants.

So the big problem is too much participation? OMG, they are doomed! The bottom line is that Debian is community generated, excellent and growing. The interviewer presented this well, let's not spin it into something it's not.

last couple years

[rubycodez]

Debian project has really come around and come alive in the last two years. it doesn't need any power/money-grubbing scum trying to change its direction or management. And remember, those 30% of you desktop GNU/Linux users with Ubuntu, that's 95%+ Debian.

Interviewer keeps trying to get at something.

[kwabbles]

"Will Debian always suffer from existing at the hobbyist programmer level and its inherent proximity to the archetypal non-business-minded software engineer mentality?"

Suffer? 12 years of working with linux, and Debian has consistently been the only distribution I've seen that doesn't really "suffer" from anything at all. In fact, I'd say that the so-called "archetypal non-business-minded engineers" have time and again produced the creme de la creme of distros and done it right. There's no other distribution other than maybe Slack that I'm more comfortable with putting into production and knowing it will run day in, day out until the plug is finally pulled.

FUD

Besides - what's Shuttleworth going to run his stuff on if Deb goes down the tubes? Fedora? LOL