rolling your own distro and the GPL (Re: [clue-talk] North Topic Track)

[Nate Duehr]

Brian Gibson wrote:

> Monday's meeting was cool to see how easy it is to
> roll your own LiveCD.  How hard would it be to extend
> that to rolling a new distro?  For example, take
> SkoleLinux as a base and customize it for SOHO.

The biggest problem with rolling your own distro right now is that if 
you base it off of someone else's distro, the FSF no longer considers 
pointing upstream to "base" source packages appropriate.  You have to 
maintain your own source packages for everything.  (Well technically you 
always did, but now they're sending out letters.)

LOTS of distros are caught in this mess, but FSF seems hell bent on 
chasing down MEPIS for it first.

The MEPIS creator has always said "my distro builds off of Debian, 
here's the changes" but that's not considered "good enough" under the 
GPL according to FSF.  He's being gracious about it, but as a complete 
outsider I can laugh and point at FSF's stupidity with little regard for 
what they think of little ol' me.

I read about all this the other day and just started laughing.  Linux 
will NEVER get out of being a play toy with a few very brave companies 
hiring a few serious gurus and using it for "big stuff", at this rate. 
Great hacker distro, still acting too immature to really be used where 
"big iron" Unix distros are really used.   (Mostly because there's no 
"one throat to choke" in Linux when something goes utterly wrong. 
Companies need to know they can kick something upside the head -- 
usually another company with plenty to lose -- if something goes wrong.)

So I find it ironic now in 2006, that only the very LARGEST companies in 
the world can afford to do "Enterprise Linux" -- software designed to be 
Free-Libre.

I wonder if this bothers those who created it as Free-as-in-Freedom 
software.  Linux isn't really helping the "little guy" at all, in fact 
BSD is doing more in that realm as it got sucked in to Apple and came 
out a fairly nice (and much better) OS for the masses.

Lots of small companies use Linux for the Free-as-in-Beer benefits, but 
have to constantly hunt through piles of resume's of so-called "Linux 
experts" to try to guess who to hire to work on their systems when they 
lose their first guru that set everything up.  Costs skyrocket at that 
point, too.

You'd think companies would get tired of the lack of professional 
licensing in the entire computer industry sometime soon, and demand some 
type of oversight.  Obviously vendor-certification is popular in IT, but 
ultimately very lame.  It needs to be 3rd party, and probably 
government-based testing created by peer review.  (Law Boards, Doctor's 
Boards, Nursing Boards... etc.)

I just wonder where the "tipping point" is.  How much data/money has to 
be lost in a single event to require computer professionals be licensed 
like all other critical services professionals?

Nate