Memo to ESR: nobody is indispensable

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 February 2007 07:26

Opinion and Analysis

Raymond also mentioned that he had started using Ubuntu and his initial experiences made him certain that "it will be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn a new set of administration tools."

Cox had a parting shot to this one too: "I'm sure they will be delighted to have you."

Other developers on the Fedora developers mailing list pointed out that Raymond had only provided his analysis of the problem and not provided a proper bug report. One developer pointed him back to his own FAQ on asking the right questions.

One thing that this very public spitting of the dummy has done is to invite speculation. Last September, Raymond joined the board of Freespire, a community Linux distribution which is owned by the company which sells the commercial distribution Linspire. Formerly known as Lindows, Linspire has no problems with including proprietary software, as long as it meets users' needs.

(In its early days, Lindows was at the receiving end of much criticism because it was probably the lone distribution which put users in a position where they would be running their systems as root, something which isn't the most sensible option to take. Unless you want to hose your system.)

Recently, Linspire and Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, signed a deal whereby the latter would be able to use proprietary software from Linspire's storehouse. The storehouse is known as Click N Run. There was also an announcement that Linspire would adopt Ubuntu as its base. Both distributions have their roots in Debian.

If Raymond had picked any other distribution than Ubuntu to move to, then there would be no speculation as to why he chose to make such a big deal about his changing distributions. He has always had an inflated sense of his own importance, so one would just put it down to that.

But now speculation will run rife as to why Raymond kicked up such a lot of dust.

It's time that even someone of Raymond's reputation realised that there comes a stage in any movement when one individual doesn't matter any more. When the movement has developed to a point where it has its own head of steam, individuals cease to matter. If someone or the other were to get hit by a bus on the morrow, the world would still continue to rotate on its axis. That's a much more difficult lesson to absorb than any message about open source.