DCC Alliance failure modes

[Paul Sladen]

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Clint Tinsley wrote:

Who really owns the DCCAlliance
-------------------------------
> There is a also a different focus between the core of the DCC which are
> IMO Mepis, Linspire, and Xandros

The 'core' of the DCCAlliance is Progeny and their Componentized Linux. The
other members (which you've listed above) are somewhat on the sidelines and
have basically been persuaded to put their signatures and logos on the site.

If you look through the PR material, you'll see that (except with the
website being hosted by Linspire) all the press-releases pimping the
Alliance have been from Progeny.

Successful standards
--------------------
> LSB itself has already been tried and failed with SuSE Linux

  * UnitedLinux was the SuSE effort that (mostly) failed.
  * UserLinux was the Bruce effort that (mostly) failed.
  * The LSB is not a failure.  'sudo apt-get install lsb' on Ubuntu.

The LSB (Linux Standards Base) and FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) /are/
standardising Distributions; even if some of those required changes are
initially annoying or require moving things about and altering mindsets.

The Freedesktop grouping is another place that is pulling strings together;  
the key to these two successful examples are that they are *grassroots* based.

Distributed verses executive
----------------------------
They have been built bottom-up, not top-down.  Bottom-up is how the rest of
the Free software we have has been built;  Ubuntu was started by a crack-
team of 15 people, but very quickly has tried to push work and energy out
into the community, rather than holding onto it.

Decentralising person-time is the key;  Examples of that are Universe (about
90% of the software available the Ubuntu!), the wiki and even hardware
(Laptop) testing, where the machines are distributed between as many
community members as possible.

If you look around and try to name mistakes with Ubuntu, the closest you'll
find are the two examples of top-down management---which are listed on
Mark's own wiki page;  The soft-porn backgrounds and an 11th hour (last
minute) change to click behaviour in the file-browser for Hoary.  As of the
following release, both of those were superseded.

[The naked backgrounds were possibly the single BEST piece of PR exposure
that Ubuntu has had.  Reversing that background decision was also the single
BEST demonstration (to date) that users drive the direction of Ubuntu.  
Therefore, to me, the backgrounds were /not/ a "mistake".]

Failing business models
-----------------------
> Novell, IMO, is not finding Linux to be its holy grail either,

OpenSuse is not the cash-cow that Netware was.  With GNU/Linux, if a
business can get day-to-day support cheaper elsewhere, they will.

Support is being decentralised;  Good for us, bad news for software-only
companies such as Novell, Oracle, SCO and that company in Redmond.
(Note that Apple, IBM and Intel are hardware companies---software is merely
a way to sell more physical computers).

In the gold-rush.  Sell shovels;  but don't tell people how to use them.

	-Paul

PS.  Did I mention Launchpad was about centralising resources...
-- 
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