Re: Clarifications
On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 09:25:35AM -0400, Brian Mays wrote:
> The way I remember, the earlier days of Debian was rather different
> from what you describe. Back then, Debian was not dedicated to
> evangelizing free software (that was the FSF's job), but rather it
> was a community that was trying to build a Linux distribution. Ask
> yourself: why was this project started? Was Debian started as a
> vehicle to promote free software? No. Debian started because the
> major distribution of the time, LSB, sucked so badly.
well said. that's basically the way i remember it too, especially what
you say later about the fanatacism coming long after the debian project
was founded.
one of the reasons for our initial split with the FSF was precisely that
kind of intolerant fanatacism. the FSF wished to impose restrictions on
us and require us to do things that we did not want.
BTW it was SLS, not LSB. and it did suck. it sucked so badly that even
Slackware was hailed as a great improvement...i started with SLS,
switched to Slackware when it was released, and after going through the
Slackware "upgrade" process 2 or 3 times switched to debian...one of the
best decisions i ever made.
OTOH, SLS was one of the first linux distributions, if not the first
(the only other one i can remember from that time was the "MCC interim
release") - everything that came after it gained from the experience
and benefited from the mistakes it made. it, like slackware, was an
excellent demonstration of the reason why a free software operating
system *NEEDS* decent package management tools.
> Therefore, the project's goal was to grab and integrate as much
> software as possible for our users, and the only criteria for
> packaging a piece of software were
>
> (1) "Is someone willing to take the trouble to maintain it?", and
>
> (2) "Can we legally distribute it from our ftp site?"
>
> I still think that these make pretty good criteria.
<aol> me too </aol>
craig
--
craig sanders
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