Dear friends:
"If Microsoft were to cook up a plan to cause Linux to disappear in a virtual
Tower of Babel it could scarcely be more effective than that which has been
adopted by distributions on their own, voluntarily."
This is from an article by Dennis E. Powell in Linuxtoday (June 27, 2001)
(www.linuxtoday.com) entitled "Separated by a Common Operating System".
What do our experts (and newbies) think? If this is true, then is Linux not
in deep trouble?
A longer quote from the article follows:
" This column started out in the hope of comparing Progeny with SuSE; that
fell apart when I realized that Progeny's take on things, inherited from the
Debian to which I understand it remains true, is just too different from the
RPM-based-distributions' way of doing things for me to learn it in a short
time. What I went on to discover, though, is that the lumping together of
RPM-based distros really can't be done, either. They are beset by
incompatibilities such that they might as well be different operating systems
(with some exceptions for people who compile their own stuff, presuming that
they remember to install the -devel version of everything, which is also
ridiculous). Knowledge of one distribution has little to do with any other
distribution. This sort of thing occasionally results in indignant howls, as
when Red Hat shipped gcc-2.96. Usually, though, it goes largely unnoticed.
But it has its effect, and that is confusion among prospective users. Not
long ago, if you got a Linux distribution you got Debian, Slackware, or
something else, and the something elses were largely interchangeable as to
what they installed -- the differences were in installation and configuration
tools, the newness of the stuff included, and what applications were
provided. Upgrading was fairly simple, because an RPM for one would probably
work for all. And Linux desktop use grew."
"Now incompatibilities are being introduced hand over fist, as distributions
fight for a bigger and bigger piece of a diminishing pie, until oneday one
will own all of nothing. Does this do anything useful for the distributions,
users, Linux, anybody? Well, no. And while I've singled SuSE out because it's
the one where I've most recently encountered this nonsense, no distribution
is exempt. If Microsoft were to cook up a plan to cause Linux to disappear in
a virtual Tower of Babel it could scarcely be more effective than that which
has been adopted by distributions on their own, voluntarily."
Benjamin
--
Sher's Russian Web
http://www.websher.net
Benjamin and Anna Sher
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
