Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Progeny is sort of “the commercial face of Debian”. That’s something that get’s bandied about, often with the follow-on quesion “why does Debian need a commercial face?”

It doesn’t. Debian is a wonderful volunteer organization, militantly free. It is a major part of the “great hope” that Linux is free to the masses and has a huge range of free software available for it. There is an army of package maintainers ensuring that Debian users can track changes to “upstream” software, and that security updates and version upgrades are available. It is a well-managed distribution. It isn’t easy to see what Debian needs (other than maybe some grants or participation) that commercial organizations are uniquely suited to provide.

But Industry needs a face for Debian, a place where they can get aid and comfort in their attempts to serve their primary business needs of providing useful products or services. They need Debian, because Debian provides a lot of value for absolute minimal cost (like “free”). If you know what you’re doing, you can build almost anything out of the various linux parts.

So why does industry not work directly with Debian? Because the open-source strength of Linux can also be its commercial weakness — it develops and advances very rapidly. In a business of building assembly-line machines, a seven-year old piece of capital equipment is almost new. Contrast that to the idea that the three-year-old Woody release of Debian is considered “stale” — it’s a dinosaur. Progeny, as a commercial face, can be a buffer between the rapid rate of open source change and the comparatively glacial rate of equipment adoption. We can keep the old versions current longer than the community cares to.

Remember that GNU/Linux isn’t one thing. It’s a bazillion free software packages which are funnelled together, and combined into any number of OS products. What progeny has learned (through CL) is how to put together many different Debian- or RedHat-based proto-products, where each proto-product is a reasonable starting point for a custom distribution. Think “standardization with customization”, rather than “one size fits all” or “unique operating system”.

And of course, there is always a tradeoff between “new hotness” and “tried and true”. Some product developers may want the hottest versions of some packages, and the older, more stable versions of others, depending on their areas of exposure and value. And it’s not unusual that a commercial wants to add software that isn’t part of the free Debian releases — stuff that isn’t free or is only released for other distributions.

Progeny has guys who really know their Linux, inside and out. These guys are experts in making custom distributions, custom installers, and many other arcane arts. Sometimes those guys let me sharpen their pencils. They’re cool. We have the talent and the tooling to manage custom distributions that run ahead or behind standard versions. Progeny Transition Services has proved this rather nicely.

A Debian face is good for business. It’s good that that face is separate from Debian because monied interests can otherwise exert pressures that benefit them alone. It’s better that Debian is free and makes decisions for a community, and it’s good for companies that someone helps them leverage Debian without exerting leverage against Debian. If a business works through the proxy of Progeny, they are not open to the criticism that they are trying to take over the project.

And now, we’ll be shortly announcing new ways of efficiently managing more distributions and more proto-products. This will not only will help us to deliver our services much more efficiently, but will be lending some CL super-powers to distro managers who don’t even subscribe to our services! This is new stuff, and we expect people to get pretty excited about it. I can’t make any announcements, but I’m betting it will knock your socks off.