The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: slowing down point releases



On 30 Jul 1997, Rob Browning wrote:

> We should release new versions whenever they improve the OS for our
> users.  Delaying versions to make CD distributors just hurts net users
> for no reason.  Not delaying releases doesn't hurt any users.
> 
It does if they can't get the product in their local book store. Because
the store will return all books that have an out-of-date CD in them, there
needs to be some shelf time for the product so that distributors have a
chance to make a profit. With a 4 week order cycle at the book store, by
the time the distributor can get the book on the shelves it is out of date
and gets returned.

If commercial ventures can't make a profit they will not deliver the
product and our users get stuck with a less than professional product
delivery system. 

I am beginning to see why Debian hasn't made it into any commercial
venture. If we keep saying "We don't care about folks trying to make a
living with our software." we will never be able to penetrate the broader
market place represented by book stores and computer outlets.

If we want to see a Debian book on the shelvs of Waldens or Boarders the
requirements of the marketplace will need to be provided.

Redhat provides this market time by only delivering one release. All
additional changes to packages is put in the Updates directory for FTP
download. As a result the Original release CDs can be sold during the
total time of the X.Y release, with the end user only needing to get on
the net to download those packages in updates that need to be upgraded.

Slackware manages this in a much more dishonest fashion. The X.Y release
continues to get updated, but is never re-named, so that Walnut Creek can
continue to market the X.Y release that they pressed, even though the FTP
sites have a different product. This may be the main reason that Slackware
is suffering in the market place, since the end user has no idea which X.Y
version they actually got.

We can continue to ignore the commercial market for idealistic reasons,
but if we ever want to see this product on the shelves of retail stores we
must create an environment where the person who attempts to penetrate this
market isn't guaranteed to loose his or her shirt in the process. Multiple
point releases in short time periods don't provide this kind of market
place environment. This doesn't mean we can't continue to fix "real"
problems with the release, we just need to do it in a way that makes it
viable to deliver the product.

Waiting is,

Dwarf
-- 
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aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

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