| MEPIS founder Woodford gets personal in MadPenguin interview |
Aug. 30, 2005
MadPenguin.org has published a lengthy interview with MEPIS Linux creator Warren Woodford. The article offers insight into the two-year-old distro's rapid and widespread proliferation. Woodford's secret? "Give desktop customers what they want: a simple, reliable set of applications that are easy to acquire, install, and use," according to the article.
"Give it away for free. Always," the article continues. "Show respect to the command-line community who created the base packages in the first place. Join the Debian Common Core Alliance, and play nicely in the sand box with them. Believe that the community will buy MEPIS CDs and t-shirts. Sell a subscription to your distro. Get a retail distributor like Technalign. Leverage this growing popularity by selling SOHO servers and other products into the corporate world. And most important, do it all out of podunk Morgantown, West Virginia, so that you can keep your costs down and actually make money at competitive price margins. Who needs the high rents of Redmond?"
Some random Woodford quotes from the article:- "The only way that Microsoft could crush us is by spreading FUD such as a rumor. I heard that a Microsoft Gold Partner was told by Microsoft that the partner better not have anything to do with MEPIS, because Microsoft was getting ready to sue MEPIS! This rumor is obviously totally false and ridiculous..."
- "Right now, there's an awful lot of free Linux being used in the corporate world, but I'd be willing to bet that it's mostly Debian, and it's mostly on developer workstations."
- "The corporate market doesn't buy on the basis of the cost of the software. They buy based on whether or not the product is configured to solve a problem for them, and whether the product is supportable and sustainable over time. Compared with the artificially high price of Microsoft's products, we have wide latitude to deliver quality at a sustainable price point."
- "You can look at it either as this is 1978, or this is 1982. We're at the beginning of a whole new phase for the computer industry, if we don't blow it. If we don't blow it, it'll happen in the next two or three years. The way we could blow it is by thinking small and not collaborating, and thus not providing good products and services."
Read the complete MadPenguin.org interview with Woodford here.
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