On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 16:52:12 +0400 Igor <lanthrus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You're living right not in competition.If you're on an island > you compete with animals for food and water. If you're in a condo - > hell, you know how many on this planet WISH to live in your house > right now and what stops them from doing that? > > And you belive that you're outside competition. It looks unreal. > Gentoo is in competition with other distros - it's real and happens > right now. That's the marketing view on it; but now take a look from the customer view, why am I and you on Gentoo or one of its derivatives and not on some other distribution out there. Exactly, Gentoo provides some things that are hard to find in other distributions; patching the source, having more choice, remove features you don't need, etc... Customers are looking for that; my thought exactly when I was looking for Gentoo was "I want to be able to easily manipulate what I use", Gentoo's ability to just patch the source code is great for that. I'd be scared of going to a binary distro, the distros where you are source based are quite limited; if I'd quit Gentoo, I'm for sure I'll either be on a Gentoo-derived distribution or build something similar. The former makes me still be on Gentoo, or at least its idea; the latter might be quite an effort that'll take quite some time too get going, but I'll know for sure if that ever jumped my mind that I would miss the Portage tree and so on. So, other non-derived distros don't really look like competitors to me; they might satisfy a set of our customers, but then you can just as well realize that those customers have no real need for Gentoo and were bound to leave sooner or later anyway. As for derived distros; forking is great, right? We are no longer using the old solid wheels that break or the old cars that fail to continue to drive after a bit of usage; no, we are using well designed, well implemented, well tested wheels and cars that continue to drive for months to years. And as an example, we also have ideas like those small cars which only fit one person; who knows, that idea never catches on in public. But at least we've satisfied the needs of a few people out there; not everyone wants to have such a car, just a few persons that are in need for it. > Are you absolutely sure that in the condition when nobody knows how > Portage works we may go that far as saying we have a healthy Penguin? Reverse engineering a car will not say anything about its health; fixing its bugs, testing it and supporting it however will. Otherwise we could claim solid wheels and old cars to still be healthy. -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : tom...@gentoo.org GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
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