| 1 |
On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 16:52:12 +0400 |
| 2 |
Igor <lanthruster@×××××.com> wrote: |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
> You're living right not in competition.If you're on an island |
| 5 |
> you compete with animals for food and water. If you're in a condo - |
| 6 |
> hell, you know how many on this planet WISH to live in your house |
| 7 |
> right now and what stops them from doing that? |
| 8 |
> |
| 9 |
> And you belive that you're outside competition. It looks unreal. |
| 10 |
> Gentoo is in competition with other distros - it's real and happens |
| 11 |
> right now. |
| 12 |
|
| 13 |
That's the marketing view on it; but now take a look from the customer |
| 14 |
view, why am I and you on Gentoo or one of its derivatives and not |
| 15 |
on some other distribution out there. Exactly, Gentoo provides some |
| 16 |
things that are hard to find in other distributions; patching the |
| 17 |
source, having more choice, remove features you don't need, etc... |
| 18 |
|
| 19 |
Customers are looking for that; my thought exactly when I was looking |
| 20 |
for Gentoo was "I want to be able to easily manipulate what I use", |
| 21 |
Gentoo's ability to just patch the source code is great for that. |
| 22 |
|
| 23 |
I'd be scared of going to a binary distro, the distros where you are |
| 24 |
source based are quite limited; if I'd quit Gentoo, I'm for sure I'll |
| 25 |
either be on a Gentoo-derived distribution or build something similar. |
| 26 |
|
| 27 |
The former makes me still be on Gentoo, or at least its idea; the |
| 28 |
latter might be quite an effort that'll take quite some time too get |
| 29 |
going, but I'll know for sure if that ever jumped my mind that I would |
| 30 |
miss the Portage tree and so on. |
| 31 |
|
| 32 |
So, other non-derived distros don't really look like competitors to me; |
| 33 |
they might satisfy a set of our customers, but then you can just as |
| 34 |
well realize that those customers have no real need for Gentoo and were |
| 35 |
bound to leave sooner or later anyway. |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
As for derived distros; forking is great, right? |
| 38 |
|
| 39 |
We are no longer using the old solid wheels that break or the old cars |
| 40 |
that fail to continue to drive after a bit of usage; no, we are using |
| 41 |
well designed, well implemented, well tested wheels and cars that |
| 42 |
continue to drive for months to years. |
| 43 |
|
| 44 |
And as an example, we also have ideas like those small cars which only |
| 45 |
fit one person; who knows, that idea never catches on in public. But at |
| 46 |
least we've satisfied the needs of a few people out there; not everyone |
| 47 |
wants to have such a car, just a few persons that are in need for it. |
| 48 |
|
| 49 |
> Are you absolutely sure that in the condition when nobody knows how |
| 50 |
> Portage works we may go that far as saying we have a healthy Penguin? |
| 51 |
|
| 52 |
Reverse engineering a car will not say anything about its health; |
| 53 |
fixing its bugs, testing it and supporting it however will. |
| 54 |
|
| 55 |
Otherwise we could claim solid wheels and old cars to still be healthy. |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
-- |
| 58 |
With kind regards, |
| 59 |
|
| 60 |
Tom Wijsman (TomWij) |
| 61 |
Gentoo Developer |
| 62 |
|
| 63 |
E-mail address : TomWij@g.o |
| 64 |
GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D |
| 65 |
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D |
Archives