This is my feedback on the scuffle between DistroWatch’s founder and leader Ladislav Bodnar and OSNews’s managing editor Tom Holwerda regarding the recent release of the distribution of Linux called Elive. You can see Mr. Holwerda’s blog entry here, and Mr. Bodnar’s response here.

Looks like Mr. Holwerda bit off a little more than he could chew this time. If a distro is going to claim to be free and open, then they shouldn’t be terribly surprised when they’re held to it. Having a tiered download system doesn’t bother me, but when your free download server is down for weeks (or days, when you’ve got as many contacts as Elive) and you decide to go ahead with making a new release anyway, there’s something slightly icky going on. Seems to me like DistroWatch was simply assuming that Elive meant what it said about being freely downloaded and was holding them to it.

And really, Mr. Howerda can resort to the argument about using up bandwidth if he feels the need to, but for a free and open project, using that bandwidth for downloads is exactly how it should be used. If Elive has not lost site of their goal of being freely distributed and if OSNews has not lost site of its goal of seeing that free and open distros grow and get downloaded as much as possible, they should both be thanking DistroWatch for getting Elive attention and for making it nice and easy for everybody to grab a copy.

If they did in fact email Mr. Bodnar and ask him to not post direct download links, then perhaps Mr. Bodnar should not have done that. Only the Elive team and the DistroWatch team will know if those emails ever were sent and received. I personally hope that those emails were never sent and that Mr. Howerda was mistaken, because the alternative would mean that Elive knowingly issued a release when their free download server was down and expected DistroWatch to just shepherd people over to their pay-per-download server while having DistroWatch list them as free and open. That would be very, very disappointing on the part of Elive, and would also reflect rather poorly either on Mr. Holwerda’s or OSNews’s journalistic credibility. A little analysis would’ve probably been a good idea before running the smear against DistroWatch.

But hopefully, this was all just a simple technical error on Elive’s part and they’re willing to say “Thank you” to Mr. Bodnar for providing a working download link during a new release’s debut, and hopefully Mr. Holwerda and OSNews will say “Sorry” and review their methods so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 2:58 am and is filed under All Entries, Technology, Visual Flavor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.