Matthew Garrett: “In 2001, you released a distribution that was not binary compatible with Debian. Why did you make that decision at the time, and why do you now believe it to have been the wrong decision to make? Do you honestly believe that having the same glibc version as Debian would have made Progeny 1.0 more of a success?”
We made the decision to track unstable for the same reason Ubuntu presumably did: We wanted newer packages. We saw that as a big draw: “Debian with fresher bits” was how we thought of it at the time. The “stable is old” problem was compounded back then because testing did not yet exist, so the choice for users absent Progeny was binary (no pun intended): stable or unstable.
To be honest, we didn’t think a whole lot about binary compatibility (we did, however, view working within the existing Debian community as critically important). If that’s your point, you got me. However, you have to put this in the proper context: This was before the explosion of Debian derivatives (Progeny was among the first, after all, along with Corel and Stormix), so worrying about compatibility then would be a bit like Gentoo worrying about compatibility now.
It was the wrong decision to make in the context of what’s happened with Debian derivatives in the intervening four years. That’s my point. And, no, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference with respect to Progeny Debian 1.0’s fate. The real question is: Had Progeny Debian 1.0 been successful, would Debian be where it is now? I don’t know.
That’s actually a very interesting question. Let’s take a step into the bizarro world and imagine the outcome had been different: Rather than being a failure, Progeny Debian 1.0 is a huge success. Developers begin building packages on Progeny Debian 1.0. The packages these developers build begin to circulate, and before long, “Debian” packages are out there that don’t work on Debian because they’re linked against Progeny’s incompatible libc. Meanwhile, Progeny is seen as having the momentum, so more and more developers move over to target it as their “Debian platform”. This ultimately takes away energy that otherwise might have been put into the community project.
At the end of the day, though, Progeny is not a community project—it’s a commercial effort, and the money behind that commercial effort eventually dries up because there’s no sustainable business model (that, as you point out, was predetermined, regardless of how successful Progeny Debian 1.0 otherwise might have been). Developers are stranded, and all the energy that might have gone into the community project was wasted on the commercial effort. Most critically, in the intervening confusion, perhaps someone other than Debian emerges as the platform of choice for specialized/localized distros, the source of a lot of Debian’s current strength from my point of view (and this is one area where I think we agree completely).
Perhaps I’m the only one, but I see more than a few parallels here, the main difference being that we haven’t gone full circle with the current incarnation of Progeny Debian 1.0 yet.