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Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election
daria42 writes "A record low voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that two-thirds of the candidates have not yet cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"."
No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)
A blog like any other.
When nobody votes, it means that all the candidates
are equally good. (or equally bad, but lets' be
optimistic)
No matter the results, few will be upset.
I'm not seeing a problem here.
there's 3 weeks to vote. 1 week (and 30 whole minutes) have passed. That leaves 30 minutes less than 2 weeks to go.
any chance people will simply vote within the final 2/3 of the time alloted? No mention if this is the lowest turnout after 1/3 the time had past, or if she's comparing 3/3rds of the other times with 1/3 of the time this year...
The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.
I'm not necessarily saying they should release more, and there is certainly a benefit to stability over many releases in a lot of computing enviornments, but we're hardwired to be attracted/interested in the newest, flashiest and best things (advertisers don't spend billions of dollars a year because they have too much money). So it stands to reason that no releases means declining interest.
Debian is bloated. I personally know 2 or 3 "developers" that can't even program a linked list in C, who package small insignificant apps, but have the same voting rights than other true developers. This turned Debian a huge, sluggish, amorphous organization, unable to reach consensus, unable to work, ever stuck in the morass of debate.
The FreeBSD model is much better in this respect. Because you package or port something, it doesn't not mean you get to say where the project is going. "Thou shalt not commit bikesheds", the saying goes. The FreeBSD (and others) are solid and going ever forward. In the BSDs, it's like in the Linux kernel: meritocracy, not democracy. And as Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD) makes clear crystal clear (to those that read their lists), it is not one man, one vote. There is a vision and a method. In Debian, sadly, all that remains is the vision. Their method failed. Ubuntu proves the point.
Debian would do best to review this whole developer process thing. Trouble is, bound by democracy, the tyranny of the majority, this will never pass.
Therefore, it's a good thing if hundreds of those "developers" actually abstain.
Indeed.
I'm sure you and I both will be modded as troll or flamebait, but that's pretty much the reason why I moved on to greener pastures. Even sid got to the point it was untolerably out of date, and combined with Debian growing seemingly more political and stodgy about their DFSG-only bent, I moved on.
I use the best tool for the job. If that means it's closed-source or not free enough for Debian, fine with me. If I wanted politics with my OS, I'd stick with Debian. Instead I moved on to Gentoo (where I found quickly portage to be a hell of a lot more flexible than apt, despite years of learning apt voodoo), on to FreeBSD, and finally on to Mac OS X.
There must be a reason newer Debian-based distributions are doing so well, and I'm willing to bet a large part of it is politics. Every time Debian talked about finally doing away with the non-free repository, I laughed. There's a ton of stuff in there -- fairly common stuff, even -- that there was no replacement for. When you stop serving the users, you start losing the users. It's that simple.
That younger distros like Ubuntu offer an easier take on the Linux desktop is just icing on the cake for many people, I'm sure.
Not the general public.
One reason for the low turnout could be the same reason for the percieved lack of Debian attention to "customers" (like the accustations leveld against Gnome). If the developers aren't interested, they dont work on it. Kinda like Gnome.
Possible reasons that developers must be "staying away in droves" (Yogi Berra) maybe because:
A) they dont see any real impact/difference to whoever gets elected,
B) else they arent working on Debian all that much since its such a slowly developed platform and most devs want to work closer to the leading edge
Both of which mean they just dont care who gets voted in.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
2. Mandrake: Used to be my second choice, but now you have to pay to get most of the enticing features included. Three CDs for free version, and six CDs for paid version.
>2 GB of data not enough? What is so enticing on those 3 cd's that you dismiss Mandrake as an option for a newbie? I thought that Mandrake was supposed to be one of the most newbie friendly distros.
Unlesss she's a highly unusual user, your friend's wife is going to use about 4 applications. If she must have all the applications under the sun, configure and show her how to use the package manager to download anything her heart desires.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
However, Debian has never been strictly or even primarily about tinkering or experimentation (you cannot go a year or more between releases and be considered 'experimental').
No, Debian's niche has been the fact that while other Distros have been commercial (slackware, mandrake, etc) Debian has been the only one commited to the ideals of Open Source and to using the net to non-commercially distribute their software.
With Debian sliding further into irrelevency, we're now left with only the commercial, professional distributions to fall back on; and we are all sadder and poorer for that lack.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
I don't get why long release cycles are a problem. I like them. Is it something to do with ADD, or needing something new and shiny every day? I don't want to waste my time constantly tinkering with my system. The OS is the foundation and it shouldn't be changed every five minutes.
This is something that I think Microsoft gets right and does well. We have servers running Win2K, and will will keep running it for a number of years. Perhaps one of the impediments to this in the Linux world is that ABI compatibility is constantly changing and being broken - thus it's a PITA to run new stuff on an older base. That's not Debian's fault. Is backward's compatibility such a hard thing to ask for?
I think the reality with Debian is that it tries to be one size fits all, but unfortunately this doesn't satisfy everybody.
I feel those of you that are bashing Debian are making several crittical errors. First, is the assumption that a stable release in a ditro like Fedora is equivelent to a stable relase of Debian. Debian stable actually MEANS something. Releases are made with a purpose, not on a set schedule. Second, the vanity associated with running the latest version of a packages goes away quickly as soon as you have a cittical system break. I see a lot of posts with people switching to Gentoo for their desktop...that's all fine and good but when you are responsable for several dozen servers (or more) your perspective on packages changes considerably. Lastly, you can't beat Debian stability with the power of apt. I can do inline upgrades of my Debian machines, that's more then the Fedora users can say...I'd have to go to each server and put the new CD in, then go through the whole setup cycle. There are a lot of things to consider when looking at Linux distributions, just because you don't understand your can't appreciate a distribution does not mean you need to post. After all, us Linux users are all on the same team right?
...but Debian voting requires me to be an official Debian member, or developer, or something-or-other, and they must have my PGP key on file beforehand, and lots of other I'm-not-good-enough-to-vote reasons.
I understand the need to prevent ballot stuffing (especially with a purely electronic voting boothe) but it's damn near impossible for mere mortals to vote, even though I'm active in the Debian community, contribute bug reports, run a data center with 50 Debian servers and my vote would probably be representative of a large portion of Debian users.
Honestly, I don't care. And I run Debian. People, the whole power of Debian lies in the fact I don't need to wait for a new release. I've been running Debian Testing on my servers for two years. I'm already running the next release. I couldn't stay on Woody. It got too old. I needed newer releases of PostgreSQL and Apache and others. So I made the decision to upgrade to testing and haven't had one problem on any of my 8 servers. Its no big deal if there isn't an updated release on a CD in my opinion. I can't stand installing from CD anyway. I've got SuSE Pro 9.2 and SuSE Enterprise 9 and Debian is far easier to administer and keep up to date.
I'm sorry to say it, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be screwing around unless you're willing to accept some breakage now and then. Instead of jumping from distro to distro at any sign of trouble, why not try to figure out what's wrong and attempting to fix it. If you're not willing to do that, I don't understand why you were trying out unstable packages.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I really hate to say this, knowing that I'll be flamed and modded down, but if Debian would actually release something once in a while, it might help the project's image. I know they want their stuff to be the "best" but there is a rule in software: STFP - Ship The Product (the "F" is silent)... People appreciate that a lot more than just waiting until Real Soon Now (tm).
Sure. Go ahead, show me how easy it is to install a stable release of Debian if you want software RAID on your root and boot partition. Bonus points if it works with LVM.
No, really, I'm interested. I mean, I must have been too stupid to find the point-and-click interface that lets be build RAID and LVM partitions, like RedHat's, only better.
First of all, this isn't because Debian is a bad distro--it's actually very good.
It's also not actually because of the painfully slow release model that Debian uses. It's a problem, yes, but not THIS problem.
The problem is that software and OS development shouldn't be about politics and beaurocracy; and quite honestly, people are getting TIRED of the political aspect of the whole damned open source universe.
Write software. Release it according to whatever license you see fit. If you're spending any time at all worrying about election turnout or such things, then register a trademark, get a business license, and start making money. Just keep it all somewhere else.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban