mercredi 13 octobre 2010

Asking questions, the Free Software way

Recently [1], Zack, from an original idea of Jorge, asked the project whether it makes sense to have a debian instance of Shapado (a free software web application for question and answer support for our users). The idea was well accepted and http://ask.debian.net showed up quite quickly[2].

More recently, I stumbled upon an article[3] which announces the birth of the pretty same service but for Ubuntu users (in partnership with Canonical, Ltd.). It was known for some time as http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com. Then, it was redesigned (I guess) and offered a new domain name. The service runs Stack Exchange which is like Shapado but closed-source. It even runs on Windows Server and .Net. Admittedly, there is also http://ubuntu.shapado.com but it doesn't seem very active (nor seems to be supported by Canonical).

In 2 days timeframe, both distributions gained the same service but they did it quite differently. I found this chain of events quite funny. And, really, I'm quite happy to be on Debian's side (as always) :)

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/09/msg00123.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/10/msg00028.html
[3] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/ubuntu-stack-exchange-is-askubuntu-com/