On Monday 06 November 2006 21:49, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Per,
On Monday 06 November 2006 01:54, Per Qvindesland wrote:
Uhuu why would that cost time and money, well I can agree on the time thingy do but it's do-able for sure that's how 90% out of all distros today have been started Centos as a perfect example to this, built upon RHEL but modified and developed with a lot of TLC, but yeah it could be done.
Well, if the workers can get free food, clothing, housing, etc., then no, it does not cost money to maintain a distribution. Very few people are independently wealthy and must either be paid for the work they do or give it a low priority, especially w.r.t. their paid work.
And, of course, there's the requisite computing infrastructure, computers, mass storage, high-capacity Internet connections, electric power, etc. Only some of that can come from services like SourceForge.
It's easy to underestimate the work of putting together a distribution, even if it includes only 100% FLOSS code and nothing locally developed (if it's even possible to put out a distribution that way).
Of course it requires a considerable amount of manpower and directly or indirectly a considerable amount of money. Nobody is questioning that. The same is true for the Linux kernel, for KDE, for Gimp, for OpenOffice, for Mozilla, for Amarok, for k3b, for Quanta, for Mepis, Linspire/Freespire, Kubuntu, Centos, etc etc etc etc. And still these projects do exist, and provide excellent products, with and without external money pumped in. Enough key SuSE people left Novell, it is not impossible to continue SuSE The Original Way. Just look what's happening now with Mandriva and the Mandrake founder... So if there would be a STOW, well, I would buy the STOW box, and contribute that way and with testing and comments, as I did with SuSE / Novell.