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On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 7:31 AM, Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wednesday 19 March 2008 21:11, tom wrote: > > > RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu could all vanish tomorrow because they rely on > > financial model, Debian however only requires the good will of the > > community and that is a lot harder to kill. > RedHat, Suse and Canonical could fail tomorrow - this would NOT affect the > above distributions. > There may be some name changes to avoid Trademark laws (ala > Firefox/Iceweasel) but there is absoultely no reason why these distributions > could not carry on as Debian does. How much infrastructure is tied to the founding company though? There is a significant amount of back end support needed to provide a distro on this scale and although in theory it could carry on it would be at a minimum a massive stall. Debian has massive inputs from its developers, supporters etc for not only packaging the debs but running the apt repository, the mirrors, the BTS, the mailing lists, the exotic arch compile machines and everything else i have forgotton, and i think because this is a some what distributed community project it has a much wider tollerance to disruption that a company based distro which kind of has a single point of failure. > They will all be very hard to kill - their software is free, not tied to the > 'parent' company. If they have the user support their distributions wil > continue - they just wont have a company that thinks they're going to get > money out if free software 'leading/controlling/restricting...' the > distribution. They dont need almost religious self belief to continue - just > an active user base. True but users are very fickle and many if they can't get there shiny new KDE desktop (maybe because of delays due to above failure) will not hesitate to jump ship somewhere else. Robin -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html