[gentoo-dev] Gentoo featured in "The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines"

[Sven Blumenstein <bazik@gentoo.org>]

Hi,
I just found the following paper, written by IDA ("Interchange of Data 
between Administrators") posted on a German newspage:

http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/index.jsp?fuseAction=showDocument&parent=news&documentID=1647

Its a (IMO) very good written paper about OpenSource alternatives to various
subjects like for example:

- Office
- Mail
- Calendaring and Groupware
- Web Access
- Document Management
- Databases
- Anti-Virus
- Anti-Spam
- VPN, DNS, Printing, LDAP, Samba as Windows PDC etc...

And as mentioned in the subject of this Mail, they also mention Gentoo.
Quote from Page 47 of the paper:

"There are other Distributions such as Debian and Gentoo which are not prepared
by a commercial organisation and this has implications for the way in which 
support is provided.

Support for these distributions comes either from third parties or from access
to mailing lists on the Internet. Both of these can provide acceptable levels 
of cover.

Debian has a reputation for solidity and its stable section contains code which 
has been thoroughly tested by many people world wide. There are also two other 
sections providing increasing levels of leading edge software. The stable branch 
also has the reputation of being out of date. This is unfair to some extent 
because most commercial users are principally interested in stability and lack 
of bugs, and not whether the latest peripheral can be supported.

Gentoo is a source-only distribution, which means that the Administration can 
build its own binaries easily, tailoring the Distribution to their environment 
and hardware. Building such a distribution from scratch is time consuming but 
once the binaries have been built they are available generally. This is a new 
distribution and is worth considering. Because most other Distributions are 
supplied with full source code, it is possible to tailor any of them the same way;
Gentoo, however, may be more amenable to such treatment."

By the way, those are the only two non-commercial distributions they mention :)

Regards,
Sven Blumenstein
Gentoo Linux/Sparc

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