DisroWatch Featured Story: One year with Puppy Linux

Among other things, this DistroWatch feature story describes how the Puppy Linux forum moderators subtly and not-so-subtly squashed an avid and actively contributing Puppy Linux user. Over time, these posing-deletions and subsequent denials by Puppy Linux forum moderator(s) has led to a degradation of this distribution. So-called "metrics" indicative of this, are a lack of recent Puppy Linux advocacy on such community forums as LXer and its gradual drop in its DistroWatch rankings.

One of the points in all this -- indeed this point is emphasized in the DistroWatch feature story itself -- is that no matter how technically advanced and feature-laden a FOSS project is, without such a project's dynamic Community support, the project (or distribution in this case) may just fade into oblivion.

Perhaps this should be something to keep in mind for Linux distributions who have made or WILL make non-transparent patent-protection deals with M$ really for their own (non-Community) self-interest, but claimed in the names of "interoperability" and "benefit for our customers". Perhaps further, some of the companies making such deals will also fade into oblivion as befits Puppy Linux, having forsaken or having otherwise trodden-upon their supporting FOSS Community.

2c

Ummm....Puppy Linux and SuSE are very different animals.

SuSE sells to enterprises and offers paid support. In that market the "community" is far less important than it is to a desktop-oriented distro.

Not unimportant, just less important.

Particularly disturbing is that there are other Distros with the same problem. Recently I made a post into a distro forum only to have it deleted with a rather rude message from one of the moderators not to post things of that nature. OK, I thought to myself, I didnt see a congratulatory post on how they were moving through the distrowatch rankings as worthy of deletion since it was posted in off-topic to start with, but OK.

The funny thing is, shortly after that I saw a nearly identical post on the main News page of this distro.

This is the same distro I use for my laptop and put on my aged mothers laptop, the same distro I suggest to linux newbies and keep a couple of livecd's kicking around to pass around.

There are control freaks everywhere, even in the linux community. Like my offline life I do my best to avoid them, so in this case, with this distro, I have made the commitment to never visit those forums again. I'll still use their IRC channel, but atleast there I can attempt to rationally discuss problems that come up.

Quoting:Perhaps this should be something to keep in mind for Linux distributions who have made or WILL make non-transparent patent-protection deals with M$ really for their own (non-Community) self-interest, but claimed in the names of "interoperability" and "benefit for our customers". Perhaps further, some of the companies making such deals will also fade into oblivion as befits Puppy Linux, having forsaken or having otherwise trodden-upon their supporting FOSS Community.

Actually, this focus on maintaining strong ties to the FOSS Community is immediately relevant in regards to the recent inflammatory statement by the current Linspire CEO, Kevin Carmony, as seen in the current spate of discussion following the LXer post 'Is Linux Splitting into Two Factions?' at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=88997 In any case, the above quote applies more to 2nd-tier commercial wannabe's such as Carmony's Linspire rather than the biggies of today such as Red Hat and (possibly) Novell's SuSE.

>Not unimportant, just less important.

On reflection, I have decided that line wasn't sufficient.

For some distributions, it probably makes sense to pretend the community doesn't exist.

> There are control freaks everywhere, even in the linux community.

Yes, there are. And jerks. The Slackware community unfortunately has it's share of those.

I assume you don't want to name the distro publicly. I have a pretty good idea of which one you mean, but would appreciate confirmation in private mail. Assuming you feel that's appropriate, of course. I'll understand if you don't.