Interview with the legend "Patrick Volkerding", founder of Slackware

UnixGuy

LinuxQuestions forums interviewed Patrick Volkerding:

Interview with Patrick Volkerding of Slackware

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Comments

JDMurray

That's a very good interview with Patrick Volkerding. The only questions I didn't see is how he earned his income before he received any from producing Slackware and how he earns his income today. I always wonder how and where people get their funding from and what they live off of.

onesaint

Sweet. I'll have to give this a read after work.

N2IT

Thanks for the great post!

ChooseLife

That is a great interview with a great man!

I have been enamoured with Slackware for years - it has a tendency to do that to people...

notext

I remember the pride I had getting slackware up and running on a computer back in the 90's. Its been so long I can't remember which computer it was but pretty sure I was still on a crappy compaq 486. It was the first OS I had ever installed and it was tough getting all the components working but that made it all the sweeter when it did. I've run others. Redhat, Gentoo, Debian, etc., but Slackare will always have a special place in my heart. It wasn't trying to get rich, it wasn't trying to revolutionize the desktop os world, it simply a stable OS you could always count on staying the same even when new stuff was added.

UnixGuy

JDMurray wrote: »

That's a very good interview with Patrick Volkerding. The only questions I didn't see is how he earned his income before he received any from producing Slackware and how he earns his income today. I always wonder how and where people get their funding from and what they live off of.

mmm, no idea. But from the interview, it seems that he's finances aren't alright.

Perhaps they get paid for support? I don't know really.

JDMurray

Yes, with free distros, the money is made on selling printed documentation and tech support to businesses, and swag to the fanboy end-users. I just don't know how any such business makes enough money to pay all the employees needed to keep it going. You're not likely to get consistent, quality work from many unpaid volunteers.