A conversation with Bdale Garbee

Sam Varghese
Monday, 26 January 2009 03:36

Opinion and Analysis

iTWire: At the last LCA, two Debian developers gave a talk about trying to get more corporates interested in the project. Has there been any progress on this front?

BG: I have to be honest and say I don't really know. It's interesting to me how the nature of many of my conversations have changed over the years.  I used to get lots of questions from people asking me why is it that you and HP do so many things with the Debian project and i don't get that kind of question anymore.

The question I get instead is usually more specific - we'd like to see this particular thing in Debian, how should we go about it? That suggests to me that on some level either I'm just having fewer of those conversations with people or that people have moved beyond trying to understand why you would want to work with Debian and are instead trying to figure out how to work with Debian.

At the same time, there's probably on some level, I think, less attention of a certain sort being paid to Linux at this point per se. I was having a conversation with another delegate at the conference this morning about the fact that as recently as a few years ago, we were still getting lots of questions about what is Linux, why would I want to use it. We were talking about its use in consumer products as the embedded operating system. We really have got to the point where the question is not what is Linux and how would you use it; on the rare occasion when you come across a product where it would seem appropriate to use Linux and it's not being used, you wonder, why aren't they using it?

I think, on some level, all these things are shifting over time, the whole market and its attitude towards Linux is maturing. As this happens, the role played by projects like Debian and the other distributions, both commercial and non-commercial, will gradually shift over time. I'm not surprised to see these things change over time, I think it's a natural consequence of the evolution of the marketplace.

iTWire: The final question is a frivolous one - how do you maintain your beard so well?

BG: I have this 35-year-old electric trimmer that I absconded with from my father when I went off to college. It has one remaining intact plastic cone thingy for it and it happens to be the thing (I use).