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"."

Comments

One Meaning:

[mOoZik]

No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)

Re:One Meaning:

[lewp]

I hate to say it, but this sounds about right. I ran Debian for years, and got many other people started on it. I've never considered myself a zealot about anything, but Debian was about as close as I've gotten.

It's just not relevant anymore. It feels like the HURD of distros. What's worse for their userbase is the fact that other distros (Ubuntu, Knoppix) have taken their base and made something that's actually worth using on top of it.

This is, of course, a good thing for the community as a whole, so it's hard to cry about it. Debian will either evolve or be folded into one of the projects it spawned. Nothing's lost either way, umm... hooray for open source?

Re:One Meaning:

[gl4ss]

* What's worse for their userbase is the fact that other distros (Ubuntu, Knoppix) have taken their base and made something that's actually worth using on top of it.*

uhh.. isn't that pretty much the whole GOAL of debian, to be a solid base for building such distros around it? I see ubuntu as a huge win for debian.

personally.. I trust the judgement of the guys who know these guys so that they choose the right one for the job - personally I'm a debian user but have no frigging idea who does what and who would be the best one for the job.

geeze

[dAzED1]

so lets get this straight:

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 tyranny of the majority hurts Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

FYI: Vote is Developers Only

[EQ]

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.

Re:Linux changing in nature

[Mr Ambersand]

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.

What's with all the Debian bashing?

[TripHammer]

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?