On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 12:16:36AM -0500, Doug wrote: > <Long rant on soapbox> > > And isn't Redhat starting to do the same thing (charging for products, like > postgresql)? GreatBridge also officially died today, Suse is on life > support, VA no longer sells hardware and is selling software, Loki is all > but gone, don't know anything about Debian, and Mandrake I don't think is in > a "healthy" state either, and probably a dozen or so other "open source" > companies have died quick deaths in the last year(probably more). <OBDebian boosting> Debian being a volunteer organization is fine. Sure development might slow down if some of the developers who are paid by various companies to work full-time on Debian suddenly had to find other jobs. All Debian developers started out as volunteers, and the back log on people trying to become developers is still huge so there's no reason to expect any huge problems for Debian. In fact, Debian real problems seem to be in scaling up to work with so many developers and ports. </OBDebian boosting> Besides which, a shake out in the Linux world was inevitable, even if the tech market hadn't crashed. There are just too many for pay Linux Distros at the moment. But the beauty of open source is that even if all of these companies go belly-up the software will still be out there and development will continue. The worst case I can possibly imagine still includes Debian, Slackware, and the BSDs going strong (and I'd be awfully surprised if Red Hat doesn't survive at some level). <snip long rant> -- Jim Crumley | Free Dmitry Sklyarov! crumley at fields.space.umn.edu | http://freesklyarov.org/ Work: 612 624-6804 or -0378 |