Progeny Brings Red Hat and Debian Closer Together

Wow. I sent a message to the Debian developer mailing list Friday afternoon quietly (or, so I thought) updating the Debian community on Progeny’s various Debian-related projects. I left town for the day Saturday and returned to find my message had been Slashdotted, with writeups posted in various places, such as Ars Technica. Here’s an excerpt from the Ars Technica writeup:

Because Red Hat has recently opened its distribution to the community, cooperation between Red Hat and Debian is more likely than ever. A distribution-neutral APT and configuration framework would do much to further such cooperation. Would a merger of the two projects even be possible? Debian has a very loyal following, due to its massive software catalogue (over 13,000 packages) and dedication to Free software. Red Hat, with its strong corporate partners and all-star kernel development team, brings legitimacy to the corporate market.

While each distribution has a distinct and dedicated following, many would agree that further cooperation could only benefit everyone involved. Even if the two distributions do not merge, any standard which Progeny develops would certainly benefit the community. Could this possibly be the beginnings of a practical common packaging standard, outside of what is defined in the Linux Standards Base? Red Hat and Debian certainly have enough combined developer mindshare to make such a decision practical.

Could such common ground between the commercial and non-commercial leaders of Linux help consolidate the market? This would allow independent software vendors to target a much greater audience; currently, practical matters force them to target only one or two distributions. Regardless of the specifics, this announcement could have long standing effects on the Linux landscape. Progeny may have provided the catalyst needed to create a distribution of unprecedented quality; it is now up to open source software developers to follow through.

It’s heartening to see so much positive feedback and interest in moving the distributions closer together. More to come..

7 comments on “Progeny Brings Red Hat and Debian Closer Together”

  2. Bobber

    One question seems to be how the Anaconda port will fit in with the current Debian efforts to create a better installer. Is there any reason to merge these efforts or is it better to have several installer choices?

  4. maceto

    Hi, back agian. Ian will you (please,please) release an unofficial testing built on the anaconda, cause the new debian inst don`t work on my box, and we can start to play/buggfind?

    I LUVE installing/playing- but as long as the new inst jams up, well- can go with old woddy though and apt-get…

    What I also would like to se in there, since testing, an option of 2.6 kernel (must select this, not default) and PLEASE xfree 4.3- know it`s not a must have pack, but hell debian uses time to jam that into unstable, 4.4-5 will be out before that goes into testing.

    But for a rock stable server system, debian er better that the rest, could have som of the redhat admin tools in there though :-)

  5. Ian Murdock

    The code will be released in the mid-November timeframe, along with an Anaconda-installable sarge CD/ISO. If you’d like to get your hands on the code before then, drop me a note at imurdock@progeny.com, and I’ll see what I can do.

    To be clear, what we’ll be releasing in the mid-November timeframe works but will most likely not yet be fully-functional. Most notably, we haven’t yet managed to get Kickstart working. The GUI mode works very well though, with just a few kinks, and that is undoubtedly where most of the interest lies.

    -Ian

  6. Sajith VK

    Hi,
    I heard about PickAx project of progeni.
    From where can I get more info about it?.
    I am trying to create an educational GNU/Linux distro for schools in our area. I can be one of the early beta tester of PickAX.

  7. Keith Fernandez

    Hi Ian,

    Where can I get debian with the anaconda installer. or is Debian yet to release it. I couldnt find anything on their website.
    Please let me know as I was very comfortable with anaconda with redhat and now that redhat is gone, I am looking at porting my software to debian. If I do get anaconda with debian that will be great..

    Thanks…

    Regards,
    Keith

Comments are closed.