| Libranet's lesson: you can't keep a good open-source distro down |
Dec. 01, 2005
As the end of last week, Libranet, a well-liked Debian-based distribution, seemed to have reached the end of the road. Or had it?
On Friday, Tal Danzig, one of the distribution's co-founders, announced, "on the Libranet front, I hope to be able to post something more official soon, but basically the operation is shutting down. I don't know if this will be permanent or not, but it's the situation for now. I'm not a business man, and I can't run the company on my own so it's really the only choice for the moment."
One can't blame him. On June 1st, Jon Danzig, the other co-founder and Tal's father died. And while running any small business is never easy, running a small software business is harder still.
Over on Distrowatch, Libranet's status has now been listed as "dormant".
So, is this the end for Libranet?
In a NewsForge interview, Jon Danzig said, "It really became a matter of being an overwhelming task for one person to run all of Libranet... It became too difficult for me to continue the project in its current form."
Unlike other Linux projects though, Libranet, as it is now, can't just be released to the community.
Its two strongest features, an excellent installer and its configuration tool Adminmenu, are both proprietary code. Without them, Libranet is just another of hundreds of look-alike Linux distributions.
Now, however, according to the NewsForge interview, there's at least a chance that those tools will be released to the open-source community.
"If Libranet does not move forward as a commercial project," Danzig said, "I will do my best to make sure that some sort of free software project can germinate around the Libranet tools."
One can only hope.
I see a melancholy lesson here.
Proprietary code can disappear when its company or creator goes away. With open-source code, however, your work can live on forever.
For programmers who really take pride in their work, it's a point worth pondering.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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