OSNews

The Haiku core devs have taken probably all preventive measurements at their disposal to mitigate a scenario with 1000s of Haiku based and Haiku named distros somewhere down the road and to keep as much control over the core "distro" as possible, but ultimately, a number of competing Haiku distrobutions seems pretty much inevitable to me.

In the end of the day, a distro is nothing inherently evil but just a set of decisions regarding software/library and patch management, preferably, but not necessarily encoded into an easy to use form (e.g. an installation media, etc.). The more dissenting and/or mutual conflicting ways to answer the arising questions regarding these matters are possible, the more likely another distro will pop up. Even OSes like the *BSD's or Solaris are not imune to distrobutions being started, although the availability of a "reference" distro certainly helps to keep the number down.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the adventure of further cross - plattform toolkits (and you don't have to be a fortuneteller to predict the availablity of additional toolkits, frameworks, etc. once Haiku goes fully alternative-mainstream, people like to scratch their itches in ways that are already familiar to them. And people had all the time in the world to develop an astonishing asortment of scratching methods in the past) conflicts with the core developers vision of one "official" distro for Haiku.