On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 01:45:05AM -0500, Andres Salomon wrote: > Over the past week, my boss and I have had discussions about the niche > left by RedHat, and the possibility of working on a > distribution/sub-project aimed at enterprise folks. The plan is to target > those RedHat users and companies who are unwilling (or unable) to pay for > RedHat Enterprise Linux, but need HA features. Our company falls into > this category, but made the RedHat->Debian switch earlier on. > Check out the Beowulf list archives @ www.beowulf.org for October/November where just these sorts of discussions have been happening. I've been trying to advocate a switch to Debian from RH for a lot of the high powered folk who run major clusters.
I'm not sure that a separate distribution would fly - Progeny would have carried on otherwise. Bruce Perens' proposed ??UserLinux?? would possibly be a candidate here. Nor am I sure that a "sub-project" is ideal. A customised kernel or two and potentially a meta-package might be enough. It doesn't make sense to fork unless you _really_ need to fork. A distribution based on woody + backports would be OK now, with a distribution based on the new stable once we release :) Pace Knoppix and Lindows, basing a distribution on testing may be more than a little difficult. Talking to Libranet and merging your Enterprise stuff there might be another option. In the longer term, I'm slightly sceptical about how many Debian-based distributions can survive outside Debian - but then I've had 9 1/2 years of 20/20 hindsight :) Just my 0.02 Euro / 0.03 US$ Andy