SOS: Save Our Slackware?

The last few days have seen a depressing flurry of forum topics and blog posts about the supposed death of Slackware, evidenced (primarily) by the fact that Slackware.com has been down quite a bit recently (indeed, it is down at the time of this writing). For any other modern distribution, downtime on the site might not mean anything other than some routine maintenance or a glitch, but then, Slackware isn’t most modern Linux distributions.

Benevolent Dictator for Life

Linux is big business these days. With distributions like Ubuntu branching out to everything from smartphones to TV’s, it’s hard to imagine how a modern distribution could be managed without a fleet of paid developers.

Yet, Slackware has always been the project of a single man, Patrick Volkerding. Not to say he hasn’t had help, of course. Slackware is supported by a core team of highly devoted volunteers that manage things like documentation, adding new packages to the distribution, and porting to other architectures. But a large part of the work, and indeed the final say in every aspect of Slackware, rests in the hands of Patrick.

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