"Phillip R. Jaenke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > And what about their 'partners'? I have yet to see one of their contracts. > And I'm just getting this eerie feeling that, well, it's an exclusive > contract. If you offer RedHat, you only offer RedHat as far as Linux go, > at least on preinstalled systems. VA Research no longer offers SuSE, or > Windows either, on any of their systems. Only RedHat 5.2. That bugs me.
That is a completely unfounded fear. You can look at the requirements for their resellers online at: http://www.redhat.com/corp/corp_partners_channel.html This includes the contract. All requirements are bound only to those systems you sell RedHat software on, and you are not required to sell only RedHat software. None of the requirements even mention what you are allowed to sell or not, they just say that you must provide tech support in certain situations, maintain staff that is RH certified, and achieve a minimum level of sales in RH software. There are various reasons why box pusher would want to limit the number of different distributions they support. Internally at my work we limit all of our support to Debian. When you consider that they are dealing with a tremendous number of clients, then limiting the variability of the installation makes it much easier for them to support their clients. If I was a box pusher I might well settle on supporting nothing but Debian. Talking with VA sales indicates that this was probably the primary motivator for reducing the number of distributions they supported, it was having negative effects on the performance of their tech support departments. So, provided we were able to generate more demand for Debian, I could certainly see their position changing. And anyways, there is no call for bad-mouthing organizations that have supported Debian with many resources, especially not when your complaint is mostly FUD and rumor mongering. Complaints about technical reliability are certainly valid, but they should not become the ground for such juvenile name-calling and FUD. In my mind you owe RedHat, VA Research and this list a retraction of your groundless claims and possibly an apology. > If we don't market Debian, to be blunt, we're going to get fucked. This > LPI moron obviously has some serious press contacts. He's got personal > reasons. The more damage he can do to Debian, the less credible we seem, > and the more power Caldera and RedHat have. And he didn't even mention > Slackware, which IMNSHO, is probably the *BEST* distribution if you're > going to tinker like hell with it. Maybe the first thing you should do then is think about what you can constructively say to him and others. You seem to be really good at talking at least, but it's the constructive part that has got you baffled it seems. I would propose, and if noone who is more familiar with Mr. Leibovitch is planning to do so, explaining to him the reasons behind several of Debian's decisions which he is attributing to irrational ideology or some sort. This means explaining that Debian is not against business, and that one of the reasons why we have such strict and well defined guidelines about licensing for packages is so that companies can easily and without fear repackage our work and use it as the base for their own distribution, like Corel is. No other distribution that I know of has made their licensing policy so well defined, and public (which implies stability). We should explain why we chose not to include KDE in our main distribution. That distributing KDE violates a license which is the cornerstone of all Linux distributions (because the kernel is placed under it) the GPL. This is not an ideological position, somehow opposing KDE or QT in favor of GNOME. Debian simply does not want to violate the law in a way which may weaken the binding power of the Free Software communities most important(arguable) license. Perhaps you could better spend your time writing articles about these common misunderstandings about Debian, rather than bad-mouthing, with no real basis, the people who give us the servers and bandwidth we use to create it. I propose that you would win more support for Debian that way, which is what you yourself recommend we do. -- Craig Brozefsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Less matter, more form! - Bruno Schulz ignazz, I am truly korrupted by yore sinful tzourceware. -jb The Osmonds! You are all Osmonds!! Throwing up on a freeway at dawn!!!
