Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 07, 2005 01:27 PM
Not necessarily, you are guessing about motives. There are many valid reasons to have a small distro. Small both in the sense of MB but also small in terms of audience. Perhaps it's specialised for a particular audience, even a school or a particular problem domain.
It doesn't mean that the work done there is lost to the world. It can be reintroduced to the "mainstream" distro later.
It's all a trade-off. Do you spend time convincing the big distro to adopt the features you want which may never happen or do you make a modified version. Of course there is a danger of divergence and the issue of tracking and continuing support but reconvergence is also possible, e.g. Utnubu.
A lot of the specialised distros are based on a big distro like Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and now OpenSuSE. Knoppix and Ubuntu are two of the most successful branches.
The mentality of always wanting to follow the mainstream is like requiring all scientists to research in approved areas. It ignores human creativity.
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Re:egoism
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 07, 2005 01:27 PMIt doesn't mean that the work done there is lost to the world. It can be reintroduced to the "mainstream" distro later.
It's all a trade-off. Do you spend time convincing the big distro to adopt the features you want which may never happen or do you make a modified version. Of course there is a danger of divergence and the issue of tracking and continuing support but reconvergence is also possible, e.g. Utnubu.
A lot of the specialised distros are based on a big distro like Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and now OpenSuSE. Knoppix and Ubuntu are two of the most successful branches.
The mentality of always wanting to follow the mainstream is like requiring all scientists to research in approved areas. It ignores human creativity.
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