[PLUG] RE: Steve Duin's column of 5/21/02

[Eric Harrison]

On Thu, 30 May 2002, Yuri Korobkov wrote:

>Hello All,
>

Hi Yuri!

>Wednesday, May 29, 2002, 08:17:20(UTC), some Eric wrote:

>   I for one can not figure out why they decided to switch MSFT
>   dependecy to RHAT: one company is no better than another, with all
>   the version control and continuity issues I'd think Debian would do
>   better. But I am sure thay had their reasons.

Night and day difference between MSFT & RHAT. In the latest-greatest
build of the K12Linux distro, we've almost completely seperated our changes 
from the core distribution. In need to double check, but I'm pretty sure
that everything we've added is now GPL (maybe some Artistic and/or BSD).

I could port everything to Debian or FreeBSD in a couple of hours. I've
encouraged ports, but no one's done it yet. It's more work than you'd 
expect.

The big trick is in getting everything to work smoothly by default. I found
that for the conflicting objectives we needed to achieve, Red Hat was the
closest. From our testing, teachers have a really hard time installing 
Debian - it's just too geeky for them.

Plus, we begged and pleaded all of the different vendors to help us. Red Hat
has been giving us support since 1997. No other vendor has helped in a 
significant fashion. Things were starting to roll at Mandrake, then they
fired everyone I knew that worked there :-(

>   OTOH they need to fill summer with something<g>.

Believe it or not, at least for my department summer is the busiest time of
year!

>   They may even go as far as including an experimental FreeBSD
>   node somewhere along the way :))
  
We have one FreeBSD guy on staff. I saw a FreeBSD box sitting on someone's
desk at Churchill High School in Eugene last week ;-)

-Eric