Is Ubuntu killing other distributions?

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 04 November 2008 03:27

Opinion and Analysis

First, it was the Debian people who were jealous of the success of Ubuntu. They, at least, had some reason to be annoyed. Now it appears there are others, from other distributions, who are envious too, and try to guise their envy under a veil of concern for GNU/Linux as a whole.
One could, of course, dismiss such sentiments as baloney, which is probably the right thing to do. But a cursory examination is needed, if only to highlight some of the peculiarities of the FOSS community.

The recent bout of envy comes from Adam Williamson, who is an employee of Mandriva, formerly Mandrake Linux. Williamson insists that his dislike of Canonical has nothing to do with his belonging to a rival distribution. It's purely personal, he says. Sure, the Republicans hate Democrats because they eat the wrong sort of grits for breakfast.

The reasons Williamson cites for this dislike are, to put it mildly, juvenile and silly. I am not a great fan of Canonical and Ubuntu does receive a fair share of criticism at my hands. But Williamson seems to be residing on some other planet.

A bit of history about Mandriva - when I first used the distribution back in 1999, it was known as Mandrake and a common description was "Red Hat plus KDE." As the years went on, it diverged and finally became a fork to the extent that packages are totally different from the parent. The company went into bankruptcy some years ago, restructured and then changed its name due to trademark reasons.

Based in France, it is a public company which, as Williamson puts it, sells Linux products to home users and corporate users, and also does OEM deals.

Williamson makes much of the fact that Mandriva is a public company, with the implication that this means the company has to be open about its financial results and therefore is above board. Canonical, it must be remembered, is a private company. But as we all know Enron was a public company as was Lehman Brothers. No need to remind people about the skulduggery that went on within the walls of those hallowed institutions.