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Craig White wrote:
|>It is Bruce Peren's reaction to Red Hat abandoning the desktop and
|>others stating issues with GNU/Linux on the home desktop.  It will be
|>Debian GNU/Linux based.
|
| -------
| I think that the whole world is interested in this one...

| BTW - The statement 'Bruce Peren's reaction to Red Hat abandoning the
| desktop' ... is that a paraphrase or is there some quote attributable to
| Bruce Perens?

I did not say ONLY Bruce was interested in this .  I said, that Bruce
was responding to things happening in the community.  Currently, the
bigger vendors are shying away from the desktop or trying to build
proprietary extensions to their distributions, thus opening a huge void
~ that a number of community projects have started to discuss attacking
as well as pissing off a lot of developers.  The fact that this is
happening is attributable, but I felt it so known in the community that
it wasn't worth pasting a million links.  Has Bruce come out and said
the reaction was purely a play against Red Hat's (and SuSE as well)
move.  No.  Has he stated that he thinks its time that the community
consolidates and moves to supporting one code base? Yes.  I am fairly
certain that before Red Hat made some of it's announcements, SuSE got
swallowed by Novell and UnitedLinux pretty much died that Bruce would
*not* have made this play.

Also in the article I did attribute, Bruce specifically mentioned that
the changing faces of SuSE/Red Hat as part of the solution.  That they
need to be service organizations and use Debian....

<snip> [1]
"Current Linux distribution vendors such as Red Hat Inc. and SuSE Linux
AG will have to evolve into larger services organizations if Linux is to
gain a toehold on the enterprise desktop, said Bruce Perens, co-founder
of the Open Source Initiative.

Perens called for Linux distributors to unite behind a single
distribution based on the Debian version of Linux, which he helped to
develop. Enterprises will be willing to pay Linux companies to engineer
the operating system for their specific environments, but the underlying
code would remain free, he said."
</snip>

He also specifically called out Red Hat as being licensed seat only as
an issue:

<snip> [2]
He said the companies will also welcome an alternative to Red Hat and
other commercial versions of Linux, which come with "odious" terms,
limiting the number of seats and requiring expensive service contracts
that are voided if users attempt to modify the software.
</snip>

The most telling is where Bruce doesn't say that he is necessarily
reacting to a single bad news item (SuSE and Red Hat), but basically
doesn't like the trend.  To me this is just politicking.  He is trying
to not blame the people making the trend, but the trend itself.

<snip> [2]
Perens said he is less discouraged by the recent news than he is
motivated to stop a movement toward "proprietary open-source code," as
vendors commodify the work developers have done for free.

"The people who develop open-source code," Perens said, "are getting
tired of being told that they have to pay to use it."
</snip>

So you are correct my original statement should have read....

It is Bruce Peren's reaction to multiple vendors trying to turn
GNU/Linux Distributions into proprietary products with some of the code
available on request.

Hope that further clarifies.

- -Derek


[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/10/HNdesktopwalk_1.html
[2] http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,61166,00.html

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