The end of Libranet?

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Jun. 10, 2006

It was a long, hard road since Libranet's founder Jon Danzig died last year, and it's finally come to an end. Jon's son Tal has had to call an end to the popular Debian-based distribution.

In a note to the Libranet community, Tal wrote, "I'm not in the position in my life or career where running Libranet would make sense. I hope that the Libranet community can understand and respect this decision. It has not been an easy process reaching this point, but I finally feel like I have the perspective to make the choice that will work for me."

Last December, Tal had hoped that "If Libranet does not move forward as a commercial project," at least "some sort of free software project can germinate around the Libranet tools."

Since then, however, Tal has done little with the project. His life has taken a different direction and he's moving to Edmonton, Canada and looking for work in that city.

In the meantime, the Libranet forum moderator had decided to finally walk away from the Libranet forums. He wrote, "I like our community, and I'd prefer to continue moderating this forum, if we had more control over it." But, "I have tried to contact Tal two or three times, to arrange changing of the registration procedure, make more people a moderator, etc., but unfortunately none of my e-mails were answered to. It is simply starting to take too much time." So, he has "decided to stop moderating these forums."

In his blog, Tal wrote, "Well, I'm not going to be developing Libranet any further myself. If any one has any interesting ideas or propositions I'm open to hearing them. For now I'll keep the Libranet forum and mailing lists running (though I do need some forum moderators to keep an eye on things)."

The project can't simply be taken over by a Linux group, since its most interesting pieces, the Adminmenu and the installer, are proprietary software.

While there is still interest among the dwindling Libranet community in seeing the distribution and its tool continue in some fashion, without either direction from Tal Danzig or a donation of the closed code to the open-source community, Libranet's story seems to have come to an end.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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