Libranet

» see libranet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Libranet cost money. Not a support contract, just a price on a Debian desktop: forty dollars in 2001, climbing with each release to eighty-nine ninety-five for version 3.0 in April 2005. People paid it in a market where the same software was free by definition, and they paid it for roughly one reason, which was a configuration tool called adminmenu that put a point-and-click front end on the parts of Debian that otherwise required you to know things. Linux Journal called its kernel compiler the knockout punch.

The company behind it was Libra Computer Systems of Vancouver, British Columbia, which had been selling Unix systems and custom software since 1984. Jon Danzig founded it. In 1999 he got interested in what GNU/Linux could do on a desktop and released the first Libranet that November with his son Tal, and for the next six years the distribution was essentially the two of them plus a forum.

That forum is the only real measure of the thing that survives, because no sales figures were ever published. In October 2003 it had 1,497 registered users and 11,485 posts. By June 2006 it had 4,161 users and 61,278 posts. Small by any comparison worth making, and large for a product sold by two people out of a Canadian suburb.

Jon Danzig was diagnosed with cancer in October 2003. Version 2.8.1 shipped the following August, and 3.0, the best-reviewed release the project ever made, shipped on 18 April 2005. He died on the morning of 1 June, six weeks later, at fifty-seven.

~ the case file ~

~ the three goodbyes ~

Libranet did not close once. It closed in installments over twelve months, and each one was written by somebody with less of it left.

The first went up on the homepage the evening Jon died: a notice headed 1 June 2005, saying the founder and president had passed away that morning and that in keeping with the company's traditions it would be closed until the thirteenth. The second arrived on 30 September, signed by the Libranet team, announcing a period of restructuring in which the company would not be taking new orders, though support would continue and the forum would stay open. It thanked everyone who had supported Libranet since 1999 and it contained a typo, a doubled word, which nobody went back to fix. That notice then sat on the front page without changing for nine months.

The third was personal. On 5 December 2005 Tal Danzig wrote that it had become clear the project could not continue in the format it had used since the first release. He was taking a break until the spring of 2006, and he was interested in finding investors for a second stage. Spring came. What he posted instead, on the forum in early June, was that his decision was not to continue, and the reason he gave was that he was not in the position in his life or career where running Libranet would make sense. He was moving cities and looking for programming work. Bruce Byfield reported it on 9 June 2006 under the headline "Libranet's last goodbye".

~ what the customers did ~

A community poll that April, taken while people were still waiting for the spring that had been promised, found 37% of respondents still running 3.0 as their main system and another 26% already gone but willing to come back. That is a product with no maintainer and a third of its users still booting it, which is either loyalty or inertia and at this distance reads like both.

The site itself went dark between 5 and 12 July 2006, about a month after the forum post. It had been serving the same 1,476-byte restructuring notice since the previous October. Today libranet.com answers with ninety-odd kilobytes about industrial microwave drying equipment, which is not a revival and not a tribute, just what happens to a lapsed domain.

~ the ruling this corrects ~

The shelf Libranet sits on is supposed to be undatable. Commercial Debian desktops of that generation tend to end in a last release and nothing else, a version number followed by silence, which makes them impossible to file properly. Libranet is the exception on its own shelf, and the reason is that the Danzigs ran it like a business with customers rather than a project with users. A business that stops taking orders has to say so. Every ending here is dated and signed by a named person, including the one nobody was obliged to publish at all.

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