[NMLUG] Recent conclusions on distros

[binyons at spinn.net (smbinyon)]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 15:08 -0600, Steve Browne wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:01:36 -0600 (MDT), you wrote:
> 
> >> On top of which Novell is backing off the
> >> Reiser filesystem because Hans Reiser was arrested on suspicion of
> >> murdering his estranged wife (or something like that) and Novell is
> >> too Politically Correct to touch the issue. Since when is Linux
> >> Politically Correct? If (hypothetically) Linus Torvalds robbed a bank,
> >> would the entire world drop Linux? Oh well, I don't use Reiser anyhow.
> >
> >Sheesh. I've heard a lot of people blame the mythical beast of Political
> >Correctness for a lot of things but this takes the cake. Even if they were
> >dropping Reiser because of this (and they aren't), calling that
> >Politically Correct like it's something dirty is just dumb. And in the
> >future I would avoid comparing murdering your ex-wife to robbing a bank,
> >there's not too many points of comparison and I personally think it's
> >offensive to minimize murder in that way.
> >
> >And anyway, the reasons discussed for them potentially dropping ReiserFS
> >is that they aren't sure about the future support of the system and
> >continuing technical problems, not anything to do with Hans's legal
> >problems.
> 
> The way the news media has carried the story is that Novell is
> dropping the Reiser FS because of the murder charge.
> 
> My main point is that the incidents of someone's personal life is only
> of peripheral interest to what useful concept/product they have
> created. My impression is that there are many IT professionals who
> understand the Reiser filesystem beyond Reiser himself.
> 
> Secondly, Reiser is only ACCUSED of something so my analogy of one
> major crime to another is illustrative and no more.
> 
> And OpenSuSE sucks.
> 
> Steve
> Stephen B. Browne
> sbrowne at ix.netcom.com
> "It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
>                           - Walt Disney
> 
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Lets not be so harsh on other distros.   If others are interested here's
a link to Novell dropping Reiser. 
 http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/2120204

Note that the Suse discussion of dropping Reiser started in September
for support issues the same day police searched occurred.  The arrest of
Reiser probably didn't help much in making the default fs switch. 

Not reading the Suse mailing list discussion, IMHO its a sound
'business' decision. I believe Suse is targeted more towards the
corporate world (the Red Hat market), where clueless CIO's make their
decision based on 'certified' components and what they read in CIO type
magazines.  Thats why Suse 'sucks' along with Red Hat, because its not
the Linux hacker distro version.  But, what Red Hat and Suse is doing is
putting Linux in the mainstream where people like me don't have to
suffer at the Microsoft self determination.  I can have my Red Hat
cluster and my Suse server and work with Apache, Mysql, and other OSS
components along side the MS heat dispensers. Therefore I support Red
Hat and Suse in this manner and when I go home I digg the world and read
e-mails (such as this) on either my Ubuntu laptop or Fedora desktop.

Going off thread here, the latest on Oracle has me worried.  I do
believe Ellison has found a way to eliminate OSS in the business
environment by undercutting Red Hat support costs by what 50%.  If Red
hat doesn't survive this onslaught it could lead to problems.

~smbinyon