i can’t really blame Sun, they can’t really close the source (that’s like taking away a magazine from a kid after he read most of it..), but they’re hiding some of it for a while. Till at least they recover.

If msft ever contributed at least 30% what Sun and Google contributes, then that day they will become a much better and smarter company in my book.

Sadly they’re such a greedy company that it may actually get hit harder from their internal decisions and who knows what (errr.. Enron?) rather than by it’s competitors.

>Hi Riyad,

very true, but can’t fully agree that corporations have so much to do with it.

Other than Ubuntu, i also used it’s father Debian and i must say it’s much more tested, faster and stable than Ubuntu has ever been.

Also many distros like gentoo/sabayon, slackware, puppy linux may not have any corporate support but they’re all very usable as well, for their purpose of course.

I believe people are the ones that believe that if it’s backed by a BIG corporation it means it’s better…

The most popular linux pieces of the puzzle: Compiz-fusion, gnome, wine, pidgin, etc. are NOT really corporate backed. But corps do contribute from time to time.

Nokia bought trolltech, but the KDE guys are keeping up the proyect in their spare time, so Nokia may never really get behind it and get it in their portfolio.

Even if Microsoft 1 day buys off Novell, openSUSE will not cease to exist, nor will it get underdeveloped

I believe The “big” distros are not better, but GET more POPULAR and this popularity does help.

Myspace with 100 million members is not in anyway better than a small social site with 50 thousand people. Quantity =! quality

The good thing is that all these linux corps make their $$ thanks to open source and help further contribute back.

I do love Ubuntu, but thanks to open source all other Distros also mature at same time. What ever happens to a single distro will never make linux loose it’s porpuse

Linux by itself has come such a long way alone, now many goverments, corporation and hardware manufacturers are actually interested in it.

But corps nor goverments start it, they just came to play along with what is now a huge movement XD

I don’t think what Sun is doing is unreasonable at all given that they paid so much for MySQL, they have to turn that into income some how… I just think a lot of folks didn’t see this “corporatization” of Open Source coming and think it’s still all built ontop of unicorn horns and butterfly kisses.

Hell, Linux didn’t have anywhere the penetration on the desktop until Ubuntu stepped in, and right now the only serious Linux distros that are suitable more mass-deployment on the desktop are all backed by large commercial entities (Novell, RedHat, Canonical)

Open source seems really good at providing a play ground for developers to go nuts in… a sandbox almost. It’s when the commercial entities step in and give shape, form and longevity to that work that it breaths new life into those items outside of the scope of other developers using your stuff.