E. Charters wrote:

> It takes a lot of money and time to stay ahead of the curve on a distro.

No. You need one person to put out the distro. PV does that already. Instead
of phone support, as you suggest, you need a forum with somebody keeping an
eye on trolls and picking up the bits and pieces that are worth adding to the
site.

That's two salaries, no rent. Add a few contributors giving a hand once in a
while and able to take the relay if anybody gets sick. Let's say $200,000 /
year for salaries. At only 25$ / year per user, you need 8,000 to keep the
distro going. If you have a good distro, getting this kind of money should be
no problem. If you can't get this kind of money, quitting is an option.

Slackware has a nice business model. Countrary to Debian's, its little
packages get out the door fast and swaret has showned they we aren't lame in
any way despite their simplicity. Slackware is easy to maintain and it uses
the best that is available from the Linux community. There's no mumbo-jumbo
nonsense tools to maintain in order to keep the customer hooked and this is
fine to me and to most Slackware users. There's no /community/ to nourrish
endless discussion, and only one platform available directly from Slackware.

But maintaining a /store/ to provide pretty much the same as is avalaible on
the net or from any Linux CD reseller, is stupid. What's the use of shipping
plastic all over the world, mainly when, as has often been told here, people
receive the said plastic, weeks, if not months, after the distro is out and
they have already downloaded the distro? This business model is dead. It died
years ago.

But it seems The Little Man does everything he can to piss off people so they
don't send money.

When I began using Slackware 3 years ago, I didn't have a cent in my pockets
and wasn't sure I'd stay with Slackware. But, say, compared to the Mandrake
and Bed Rat, I liked the no nonsense approach. Then there was this problem
with the missing link to the /dev/cdrom and I was given shit when I reported
it. I finally found out the booby-trap was intentionnaly set to /encourage/
beginners to take a subscription.

But beginners are not those you should expect money from. Often, they come
from Windows and they want to find out if 1) Linux works for them 2) if
Slackware is really the distro that's for them. Setting booby-traps is a very
bad welcome.

The die-hard trollers here say they love Slackware so much they will gladly
accompany it to its last rest. Should you suggest to include a firewall
configuration utility, or swaret to check dependancies, which they are in no
way obliged to use, they get offended because it makes Slackware easier to use
for beginners. To them, beginners must either learn the hard way or opt for
another distro, then get to Slackware.

When I came from Windows, 3 years ago, there was no Guarddog to configure
iptables. I had to learn how to write a basic firewall for a desktop. Thanks
to Daniel Robbins' text on IBM's site, and in no way to The Little Man and His
Trolls, I finally was able to.

But just finding proper instructions, getting to Robbins' text, was a pain.
When you know nothing on a subject, finding good instructions is a tough job.
And whatever I've learned then, I pretty much lost because I'm not in the
business of maintaining firewalls, servers, networks, whatever. I'm just
maintaining my desktop.

I don't believe beginners are in general as patient, stubbornly oriented
towards a goal, as I have been. They might very well begin with Mandrake, Suse
or Bed Rat, get used to their fancy tools and System V booting, and never get
to Slackware. No doubt, that's the bet those companies are taking.

Then, there are all those new Debian-based distros moving ahead: Mepix,
Ubuntu, Knoppix (if it may qualify as a distro), Kanotix, etc.

Somehow, people who put out those distros manage to keep in touch whith their
users and that's why the users appreciate the product. They don't get
slack-pkg shoved down their throat without any explanation. They have a little
on-site community they can rely on. They appreciate.

After 3 years of using Slackware, I know it suits my needs. What's more, I now
have enough money to send my 25$ a year, nothing asked in return, no problem,
even more if need be. But shit, what do I see?

The Little Man sings in chorus with the aols trolls, having a good bragging
time on irc, and the result is, when he gets sick, the distro is no longer
maintained and the signature on his Trust-Gus-Brazil messages don't even check.

Whatever you plead him to provide, he won't provide or he'll provide some
piece of crap without any explanation. Obviously, this fuck-head wants to ruin
his distro to become a legend of the good ol' times.

Well, so be it -- as everybody says, it's his distro -- but I'll have to be
excused for not contributing. After all, at this point, the sooner the distro
dies, the longer the legend will live. As Neil Young puts it, it's better to
burn out than to fade away.

So, after 3 years of getting used to Slackware ways, I'm looking for a new
distro to send my money to. It might be straight Debian updated on testing(1),
Knoppix, Kanotix or even Vector. After 3 years of using Slackware I still have
my nose up in the air, trying to sniff out which way the wind is turning.
Shit, could I have ever done without this!

(1) BTW, did you learn that apt-get /might/ be checking signatures on packages
for Sarge, something swaret already did one year ago?

> It appears to me that Linux did not get the support of the business
> community because the revenue model is hard to sell. You cannot make
> it with free downloads as attractive as they are, and 40 dollar 4 disk
> sets. Support contracts as nice as they were worked out in practice but
> also scare the bejeesus out of people at 25 dollars for 15 minutes.
> Given that people anticipate about 300 questions a year and 15 all
> niters to fix problems, the cost begins to mount to infinity in their
> minds.

Either those people are right in expecting that much need for support and they
should definitely stay with Windows, or they should be proven wrong by /both/
on-site support and good support contracts. I see no effort whatsoever on
Slackware's part to achieve the latter.

> I admit one thing, when Slack had email support, it was slick and their
> people on the phone were great. Even complex upgrading problems became
> almost understandable.

Maybe this should be provided, but really, as a last resort. When distros get
to relying on support for raising money, on-site instructions tend to get not
so clear. Then, with good reason, companies begin to fear the 25$ for 15 min
calls. The organisation must be kept lean and mean.

> I always thought there should have been docs
> like this.

Why provide the doc, if you get paid for providing the information to one
custoner at a time? And, of course, who will want to loose their time, and
eventually, their life, providing this kind of /information/, save for a breed
of jackasses who get clients infuriated?

> Offhand I would say a distro would need 4 help people of extremely good
> skills with people and distros, and about 6 programmers all full time.

Why would you need 6 programmers? Doesn't dustribution mean distributing the
work of programmers? Isn't it exactly what Slackware is doing? Anything wrong
with that? Don't Swaret and Guarddog provide standard tools that can be used
by any distro? What's the use of distro specific tools? What do you figure has
to be invented for Slackware that's not already available? A better security
check to Webmin? Well, maybe

> PV will be on the mend I would think for a few more months.

Well, you're certainly better informed than I am. To tell you the truth,
though I wish all the best to the Little Man, I couldn't and certainly
shouldn't care less. You know, Ford, GM, GE, etc, have survived the /death/!!!
of their founders. A company's scope should go beyond that.

The trollies on this ground pretend that if ever the Little Man was to
disappear, a whole pack of developper would raise to hold the flag. But the
Little Man has been sick for months, he's apparently still staggering, and
nothing happens.

Despite the Little Man promises while he was sick, Slackware still is and will
continue to be a one Little Stubborn Man organisation. It's had advantages in
the past and now has huge drawbacks.

Slackware won't survive the way things are going now. It won't survive for me,
for beginners and companies alike. It might survive for some time for aols
trolls. The time it takes to drive it to the graveyard.

GP