[Gnu-arch-users] [semi-OffTopic] UserLinux

[Tom Lord]

At the moment, this is just a (shared) thought experiment.

I invite people to read Bruce Perens'  "UserLinux: Repairing the Economic
Paradigm of Enterprise Linux" (http://userlinux.com/white_paper.html).

There's some things I like about the proposal, and some things I
don't.

I don't want to prejudice your consideration of the proposal _much_,
but I will seed discussion (if there will be any) with two
observations:

~ the proposal is rather anemic on consideration of engineering
  process -- aside from "including debian by reference", it mostly
  talks about products, not process.

~ as an _economic_paradigm_ essay, it's considerate of consumers,
  but silent on labor issues.


It's a total long-shot, I realize -- but an interesting outcome of my
raising the topic might be a joint letter from various members of the
gnu-arch-users list beginning with something like:


  "Bruce isn't an engineer by profession or avocation.  We don't speak
   for all engineers but we are ourselves engineers.  Here's our
   engineers'-perspective alternative to Bruce's well-intentioned
   +proposal."


How would you follow that perspective?   What's the _right_ way to
link up the developer community with enterprise (and other, going
beyond Bruce's proposal) consumers?

-t