[Beowulf] Redmond is at it, again

[Joe Landman]

On Sat, 2004-06-12 at 08:19, Toon Moene wrote:
> Joe Landman wrote:

[...]

> > Few if any commercial folks are going to target Debian.  This is not a
> > troll.
> 
> Well, your opinion might not be a troll, but Debian certainly isn't 
> "Fred's basement Linux distro that happens to be the flavor of the month".
 
This was/is absolutely not a troll.  One of my favorite tools (Knoppix)
is Debian based.  

Distribution choices tend to be religious preferences.  Same with
editors, languages, cluster tools, cluster distros, package management,
...

The rationale is that there are no companies for software vendors to
complain to if things need patching and they need the work done.  They
are far more likely to get responses from some quarters about the evils
of closed source than a solution to their problem.  Of get flamed for
some other aspect.  

With RedHat and SuSE, applications can be qualified against specific
platform releases with a finite chance of vendor support for the OS. 
Moreover, with the two aforementioned vendors, the fraction of their
installed base is significant, and it gives them an easy way to define
requirements in terms of that platform.

Remember, software vendors costs rise for each additional platform (read
as combination of glibc, kernel, and libraries) they have to support. 
Unless the vast majority of their customers are running distribution X,
don't expect it to be on the short list of supported platforms.

> Debian wooshed past its tenth birthday last year.

Slackware is "old" too.  Not too many folks targeting it though for
software support.

> Of course, every vendor has the right to wait until his customers are 
> going to vote with their wallets ...

Vendors either follow the customers, or they set the platform standards
that their customers follow.   



-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 612 4615