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."

Comments

Re:No power to the guy at the top?

[Jules Bean]

Yes, you're right, it is interesting. How Debian continues to function is a constant source of amazement to me, but it does nonetheless...

More or less, Debian functions by consensus, and small areas of local authority. So, just as Linux has the absolute last word about the kernel, each debian developer has the last word about his particular package. In principle, the developers en masse or the project leader can overrule a developer but this very, very, very rarely happens. I can't recall a specific instance at all.

In general, discussions carried out on the mailing list suffice to convince people amicably.

I find the most interesting phenomenon the way my trust (and presumably other peoples') of particular email addresses builds over the months. When I keep seeing a particular email address giving well reasoned arguments, I start to trust that person to understand complex issues, and simply take their word on things I may not have time to investigate fully.

So no, it's not committee as such. More community (oops.. that word will get me in trouble!)

Jules

Re:My take on Debian

[Jules Bean]

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.