[gentoo-pr] Article: High-tech social enterprise reaps free software's benefits

[gentoo-pr] Article: High-tech social enterprise reaps free software's benefits

[Donnie Berkholz]

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http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/09/29/1827208.shtml?tid=39&tid=150&tid=132

High-tech social enterprise reaps free software's benefits

The CTO uses Gentoo and talks about it, but the whole business couldn't
use it because it was too hard to roll out:

Ball's personal desktop is a Gentoo Linux box. "I've used Gentoo for
years, because it was a lot of fun and it taught me a lot about how to
administer a machine," he says, noting its unique
choose-and-compile-everything philosophy. But he also says that you're
not caught out on a limb when you use it -- the people who use and
support and develop it are there to help you.

"The community is really strong and they're responsive at different
levels," he says. "Other [free software communities] are responsive
maybe at the newbie level or way out at the expert level, whereas Gentoo
is there across all levels -- they don't flame you with Eric Raymond's
URL and tell you to get lost."

While Benetech had previously chosen Red Hat and Gentoo for its
desktops, today they're all running Ubuntu. Ball cited Ubuntu's ease of
setup and installation as the reason for the switch. "If you have to
roll out 10 or 15 machines, Gentoo's [inconvenient]. Most of our
machines are Kubuntu, but there are a couple of GNOME people in our
organization."


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