On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:53:55PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > If memory serves correctly, that slogan was added to the web > site without discussion, and was never ratified by the project, > though I do remember Bruce being very pleased about it. > > It certainly has not been either a goal nor a rallying cry for > me while I work on Debian. > > manoj
In concrete terms: Debian _is_ the universal operating system. I can take a running Debian system, easily grab the list of packages, and install essentially the same system onto a completely different architecture - and pretty much know it will work. [A running Debian development system on i386 "moved" across town onto a Sparc in about an hour start to finish, the Apache webserver and X shoehorned into a Linksys running on 32M of memory for a portable demo for the local LUG :) ]. I can remember knocking the socks off a nice Sun representative at the main Linux Expo in London when he saw me running Debian on a Sparc barely supported by Sun - and the latest software too :) A work colleague likes tiny embedded development systems. They all come with Debian out of the box (though the Marvell Sheevaplug has Ubuntu - I wonder if it needed NDAs initially?). In personal terms, I repose far greater trust in Debian developers I've never met than in almost everybody geographically close. I listened to a paid industry expert give a presentation on FLOSS to a government audience and the examples he used were of Debian. I then followed him immediately with the disclaimer that I was a Debian developer :) So no, I won't die in a ditch over it but it's a worthwhile tag and Debian sets the quality gold standard for me that other commercial-grade software manifestly fails to reach. All the best, Andy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org