[Sussex] Re: Gentoo problems.

[Steve Dobson]

Steve

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 02:21:12PM +0000, Steve Williams wrote:
> Hear hear. I would certainly not count myself as an experienced Linux user, 
> but I would certainly support Geoff's encouragement to persist with Gentoo. I 
> did and I now have an installation that is IMO superior to the SuSE 
> installation I had previously.

IMHO any distro that is developed by users for themselves (like Gentoo and
Debian [had to get the plug in didn't I :-) ]) will be better than one 
developed by a commercial organisation.  

Commercial organisations suffer from a controlling factor that just isn't
a problem with open groups: marketing.  Debian has always said that
a new release is only made available when it is ready, and not before.
This has led to the two year gap between releases.

The kernel group have also "suffer" from the "it will be read when it's
ready" syndrome.  2.4 was a long time in coming.  2.6 was originally meant
to be short (about six months IIRC) - it wasn't.

When a commercial organisation's marketing departments announces a release
date, that date is fixed.  Development time almost allays overruns.
Therefore there are two things that can be done to meet the release date.

  1). Drop functionality that doesn't work, or

  2). Release buggy code.

Normally the latter as the functionality has also be "marketed".

Released from the need to sell product (which marketing is there to 
facilitate) a project is free to let the release date slip to the right
in order that both the functionality can be in and the bugs are out.

You will also notice that open projects also have their development
versions freely available for those that want it now - bugs and all.
I can't think of one commercial developer that does that.

Steve D