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Wichert Akkerman, Last Interview as Debian Project Leader
Denial writes "Wichert Akkerman, the outgoing Debian Project Leader, has been
interviewed on DebianPlanet. After two terms as the leader of the debian project, Wichert has decided to call it quits. He talks about how the election for a leader works, his plans for the future (VA Linux) and about the future of Debian. Interesting stuff."
RedHat, Suse, Corel and Debian must unite and make the Linux Corporation ltd with Linus Torvalds as president. AND GO COMMERCIAL. Forget GPL, open source etc. When WINDOWS XP hits Linux, it would be too late. Come on, it is time to hit Micro$oft with its own weapons!!!
Hey Jules, what's up? Long time no see... :0)
So says Netcraft.
Ironic.
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Debian doesnt need to become like SuSE or Mandrake or Red Hat because SuSE, Mandrake and Red Hat already exist. Debian can continue in it's own way and become it's own niche (which, arguably, it already has done).
Personally, i have a machine at home running SuSE and a machine at home running Debian. I like them both.
Darth -- Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
why bother responding if you know its a troll. besides that isn't a good 'old style' troll, everything is spelled correctly. if it was truly up to the old standards, akkerman would have been misspelled ackerman or something.
>There's no reason to cater to people who can't
;)
>handle technical details, that market's already
>taken care of.
I beg to differ. The "market's taken care of" is "people who can't handle technical details AND don't care about an unstable system". By a very famous software company
However, there are also a whole handful of people "who can't handle technical details BUT want a rock solid system all the time".
Now this is the market. Even some people from the "can handle technical details" group LIKE graphical installers and such, like myself. It is a lot easier to make a mistake in dselect than, say, the Stormix installer.
It is the *usability* of the software that matters. And no, poor usability *cannot* be compansated by technical users. They *can* handle intricate technical details, but it doesn't mean they *have to*.
No, I don't ask. And I don't care. Who fucking cares about corporate uptake of Debian? Go away.
The thing about Debian is that in addition to all the hardcore pure Debian users you have other distros that are based on Debian plus some bells and whistles. Corel and Storm did this for a while, and Progeney is still doing it. When you count the people using a superset of Debian its percentages go up. What other distribution can you grab the whole main archive of, and know that everything is licensed in a Free as in speach manner. The only licensing issues you have to work out are with the packages you add yourself.
In the past couple of years Debian has had some rocky times, and made some major changes. There was a period of time when they were not accepting new maintainers and a lot of packages fell by the wayside during that time. There were some problems with coordinating the release of the newest release (potato) between the various architectures. I think what he means by this comment is that his bigest accomplishment is not screwing anything up so bad that Debian died.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Geez. I never realized he said this, I had to look it up and "verify" it (I found the post attributed to him anyway). I hope it was faked up because that quote is just about the most hypocritical tripe I've ever seen.
I hope this view is not common to people who support GPL. Free as in speech, does not mean Free except when I want recompense.
Thanks for the nugget.
HGttG: The guy on the top is there to draw off the attention from the real power.
"Wichert Akkerman" is kind of a scary name. It suggests demonic uses of Ackermann's function, no? Oh, well, back to Nickelodeon.
Well, I read Debian-Devel and you wouldn't know that Wichert is the big boss only from reading that. In fact, nobody really seems to decide anything, it's basically discussed until a conclusion is found, and it's not like Wichert saying 'No, that won't work, EOT'
Q: How can you identify a troll on Slashdot?
A: They are the only ones who use correct spelling and puncuation.
The beginning of the end for debian? Corel being one of the most popular distrobutions? I don't know what people around here have been smoking, but of all the people I know, debian is used the most. Granted, it's not the easiest thing to get installed and running, but once you've got it setup, it's great. It's interesting how people who like a product tend to predict the "begining of the end" for it's competitors. How many times have you heard linux bigots say that it's the beginning of the end for microsoft? Or how about Microsoft people talking about the end of Apple? Or NT people talking about the end of UNIX as a whole? As long as there are people that still care about it, it'll keep being a worthy distro to install. Nite_Hawk
Hmmm... I'm just in the process of rolling out Debian onto all our (previously Mandrake 7.2) machines. Why? Much better install, much better package management, much better stability, much easier administration. There must be something that makes Mandrake a 'superior' distribution in your eyes, but speaking as someone who has been using Linux for eight years and delivering Linux solutions to corporate customers for six, I can't think of one.
I don't find this at all surprising. Many commercial businesses (IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Be, Acorn to name a few) have tried to develop a new mass market operating system kernel over the past decade. Only Microsoft has had any success, and theirs isn't very good. In the same period a loose anarchic collection of volunteers have produced Linux. If you didn't think Linux was better than what the commercial economy can produce. you wouldn't be persuading your clients to use it. So it shouldn't surprise you that the non-commercial distribution is measurably better than the commercial ones.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
There are a number of problems that arise when a commercial entity tries to sell a free distribution such as Debian.
Selling what you could otherwise get for free..
Commercial distributions (forks) often break packages
The Debian Project has different goals than a commercial entity
What commercial model "works" with Debian?
--
assert(expired(knowledge));
What is your problem with Debian? Not able to make money out of it??
Guess that you could say that he is leaving Debian with the hot potato...
.. if only.
Excuse me, but the american president was too already *on* *the* *way* out of his job before a new one was named. This is the usual way in the past and in the future.
Wichert will be debian leader until the new one is elected, so where is your problem? The transition period is always a problem in fields where people are elected.
And regarding non-free: What have you smoked? For the first there are debian maintainers who do package non-free software for use with debian. If you miss a software, just contact a friendly debian maintainer or post it on the list. Probably someone will help you. Some of the most popular non-free software is included within debian for years.
Of course debian can not package all software, but that holds true for free software as well. Debian currently has thousands of packages and its getting harder to keep the control.
If you like debian, ask the authors of said programs which are not included to build debian packages. Show your support for debian and demand such packages! Or if the software is important enough: Again: ask a debian maintainer or post to the appropiate debian lists. There are defined ways for requesting a package!
And whats about commercial software, debian can not package most of them regarding to license issues. But, hey, if you are paying for the software, its your right as a customer to demand a debian package from the manufacturer.
Show the world that debian is a highly demanded linux distribution, and the world will give you the packages. But DO something instead of whining and FUD.
Do you think so? I'm unconvinced. In fact, I'm not sure if the proportion of non-free software on Linux has even gone up over the last (say) two years. I think probably it's gone down, with a huge number of new open source projects getting close to full functionality, and some prominent non-free projects going free (mysql, netscape, staroffice==openoffice).
Speaking for me personally, the only non-free on my machine is netscape and a couple of games. I still hope that mozilla will one day soon be a usable as netscape (and I've also just installed konqueror, which looks nice).
Heck, even quake is free and will be moving to debian's main archive soon.
I don't think the lack of official support for non-free is too much of an issue for potential Debian users: apt still installs non-free, and people still sell non-free CDs. I think a bigger issue will be that debian's usability advantages (apt, consistent configuration handling) will be adopted by the other distributions. Not that I mind, of course... everybody wins when things get better.
In terms of debian's leadership, several strong candidates have already put themselves forwards (you should be able to see the nominations at the list archives). I think this coming year will be good for Debian (first release with a fully usable KDE as well as GNOME desktop, for one thing) as well as for the free software community in general.
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a perl script.
0. Nice old style troll.
1. Debian does *not* refuse to include non-free software it goes in non-free you then choose to use non-free or not when you install (and can of course always change this choice by editing one text file after the fact) If you don't know what non-free means in that context odds are you are not going to get Debian up and running without the help of someone who does.
2. Debian is not about getting users. It is about a good solid easy to maintain stable distro that is good for the people who use it. For the most part the people who maintain Debian do so for the same reason a butcher sharpens his knives. If you don't understand think about it for a minute.
3. Get a sense of humor. That was a *funny* line.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Lol... we must seek out the real Leader of the Debian Project... who must by definition be the man who would least want to do it... indeed, one who refuses to even believe that Debian exists.
Bill Gates? ;)
Dave
--
If you think this is a troll you really don't read enough Douglas Adams
I was interested reading the "...in reality most of it is delegated to others..." and "..the only real decisions you get to make directly if I remember correctly is appointing delegates." bits. From reading it it sounds as if Debian is an example of a project being successfully maintained "by a committee" and not under the ultimate control of one guy. Compared to, say, the linux kernel where Linus gets the final say on what goes in and Slashdot, where presumably Taco gets the last word on everything.
Do people agree? Is this really proof that there are other successful formulas besides the "one amazing guy" one, or do those on the inside think that the Debian project would be more streamlined / fast-moving if it was controlled by one person more than a committee? (Or am I just talking crap as usual;) ?
Dave
Personally I'd rather have my distribution maintained by people doing it because they love it, rather than because someone's paying them too.
I like ice cream.
No, of course not. People jumping on the Linux bandwagon typically want a supported solution, and Debian doesn't offer a supported solution; that's not our business. Some companies do offer supported solutions based on Debian (for example, VA and Progeny) but I'm quite aware that RedHat has most of that share; if you're recommending Mandrake to your clients, fair enough.
There's room out there for more than one distro with different aims and objectives.
When I work as a consultant (and I certainly wouldn't call myself top-flight) I recommend Debian; that's for much more down-to-earth reasons like usability, upgradability and maintainability. But my clients typically self-support, so they're not interested in paying for support licenses; that's not the right decision for every company, but it is for some.
It's a very unusual member of the corporate world who knows enough about Linux to formulate a thought like 'if the Debian team had their way, Linux would still be booting off a floppy'! Certainly such an idea has never remotely been a Debian goal; Debian's goals relate to free software, certainly not to limited usability.
Finally, why should we budge about our ideology? Debian is about its ideology. Other distributions may be about other things, and that's all well and good. RMS believes, and I think he may be right (and many, but certainly not all, debian developers agree with me) that free software's inherent advantages make it the best solution. Time will, presumably, show whether we were right.
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a perl script.