The Anoraks' New Clothes

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a ZDNet UK Article written by Martin Butler of the The Butler Group. The article doesn't say much new, it really just says linux is just the "New Thing" (Just like windows was so many years ago) and that it will factionalize when money becomes involved. And its already started to happen. My take? Bring it on! As long as a base system of kernel, libs, and utilities is compatible accross distributions, divide all you want. Debian for Hackers. Red Hat for Suits. Slackware for loons. And the 28 other assorted distributions for whoever wants them. Its about options, and as long as we adhere to a minimal set of requirements, everyone will be happy. Am I crazy?

Comments

nope, not crazy

[kevin lyda]

defining the minimal sets of compatability will be hard, but diversity isn't bad in and of itself.

some people have commented on it (bob young is one), but linux is, and has been for over a year, attracting people from new backgrounds. windows in particular. soon, a lot of mac developers are going to pop up since they'll be learning unix skills anyway for macos x.

i'm a unix bigot, i can't see much of value coming from the windows world. i can see some good ui stuff coming from mac people, but i dunno much about macos gui access - methinks they're skipping x and doing their own stuff. that's a loss.

i really don't see anything wrong with a giant redhat, nor do i see anything wrong with more competition in the distribution arena. as long as it's gpl'd and open, we'll be safe. now if some company uses a linux kernel and proprietary code from init on up in a completely nonstandard config... well, then the linux community is in trouble. it'd be a lot of work though.

You mean compatability with standards??? WOW WHAT

[dclydew]

What is this? Some kind of weird tree-hugger Utopia? People actually writing to standards? Everyone is supposed to do it their own way, right? So they can grab the market share, right? I mean anything else would be un-american, right? Oh, wait there's more to the world than the American Way? What?

(--regains senses--)

Oh, sorry, I slept near that new Gates book, it must have tried to poison me....

The fact is, people want standards, and until people deviated from standards, the WWW was a cool place to play. As long as Linus, Alan, and the Merry Men, keep a standard kernel and lib. the Linux World will just get better and better.

Silly "technical" writers are so used to the status quo of Big Business today, they can't see the shift that's happening, there's more profit to be made in an Open Source Standards world. IBM, HP and the others will catch on soon.

Of course you are!

[Kaa]

But not necessarily for these particular reasons...

In any case, the crucial test for compatability is: can you run 99.9% of the binaries on different platforms without recompilation/major option tweaking? If you can, then the differences between, say, Red Hat and Debian do not matter. If you need to recompile or do deep options voodoo, then the whole thing will crash around our ears. To succeed prepackaged binaries have to run on *Linux*, not Red Hat Linux version 5.0 or greater with kernel patch v2.........