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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"."
... Debian is dying. (It had to be done.)
No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)
A blog like any other.
Is it something easier to use I might understand and be able to install myself?
My little site.
I, for the 199 voters, welcome our Debian Project Leader.
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...
Given some of their ultraconservative politics towards including software (I mean, if you have to compile newer versions of code because the distro has years old stuff that's no-longer supported -- in essence recompiling the entire distro) this comes as no suprize.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
My question is, what does Bruce Perens think of this?
They're using Diebold's voting machines.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The voting body is simply taking as much time to select a new project leader as they do to get new releases out.
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.
Let's face it: Debian just isn't very glamorous, and open source relies to a certain extent on glamor. You need to have regular, exciting releases that deliver better experience to users, and baseline Debian is about as far from doing that as any of the top 10 distributions out there.
Put another way, the only real reason that distributions like Ubuntu exist is because of frustration at the slow, plodding pace of Debian development.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ Try it, you'll like it. Much of Debian's developers are working on Ubuntu - you'll see them in Ubuntu's IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, etc.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
This vote is not open to the public -- just to Debian developers. So I am guessing they are all aware of the election.
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
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.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Debian developer Manoj Srivastava only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Debian is dying.
All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.
Fact: Debian is dying
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I care. So does anyone looking for a comprehensive and stable distribution of Linux!
I was trying to decide which distro to install for a friend's wife who, and I quote, wants "Linux on my computer because I'm sick of Windows crashing!" I was going to pick one of the more colorful and intuitive distros for her, even though I use Debian myself. Package management is obviously important. I'd like to direct her to RPMs or something rather than going over there to compile from source. Much had changed since I last looked a couple years ago:
1. SuSE: Gone and re-branded as Novel Linux Desktop. Now it's all tailored for business.
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.
3. Linspire: Free unless you want to use the built in package management system. Then you have to pay for it.
4. Red Hat: Gone. I hear Fedora Core is good. Nice that they gave us the free version, but it doesn't have near the support or attention that Red Hat does.
5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope...
The truth is that Debian is still totally free and offers the strongest package management out there. Anyone who actually uses Linux, no matter what distro, understands that Debian is important.
apt get vote
I use Gentoo and love it, but I must point out that what you're talking about is not entirely true. Obviously Gentoo is great for those who love source-based installs, but that's not everyone. Some people just want the ease of installing an app in 10 seconds.
Le français vous intéresse?
It's way too easy to accidentally screw the system up. I'm running a mostly "x86" box, with a few select packages using "~x86" for newer versions. Somewhere along the lines, something went wrong to the tune of I can't successfully emerge -u world without it breaking. The current biggie is gtk+ 2.6.2, which won't compile and spits out an imlib error. imlib is installed, and imlib2 (which appears to be what it really wants) also errors during emerge.
So yeah. My gentoo server box at home is fine, running a very strict "x86" package set, but once you start tweaking a little bit, who knows...
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
I believe there is a trend setting in here with the linux market, and it can be viewed as either something positive or negative, depending on your perspective. To me it is the answer why Debian isn't necessarily as popular as it once was.
Linux has been maturing steadily over the years, and it is beginning to take the shape of something viable for a casual user. It certainly isn't there yet, but there have been notable strides. As linux continues forth, it will only get closer and closer to being a very intuitive system.
That being said, I compare Linux to the likes of computer graphics. There was a stage where it just wasn't "there yet", and graphics clearly looked pasted on. This was fine because our mind said "hey, that's a graphic!", and we could easily tell what it was. Today, for the most part, we can only tell if something is a graphic because we know what is possible and what is not possible. Nothing is exceptionally glarring. Take a look at LotR, the graphics were incredibly seamless and only someone looking at them from a "possible" standpoint could truely make out the difference.
However, there was a stage in between these two levels, I liken to the example of the Final Fantasy movie, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The graphics were good, but not perfect. Our minds went from "Hey, its a graphic!" to "I guess that's kinda real", and we got confused. It winds up being confusing and awkward for us to watch, because we cannot get out minds to sort out what the heck we are seeing.
Linux is on that stage right now. It was previously something for the elite, it was difficult to use, it was extremely console based and you had to manually enter everything. I recall for the longest time needing to enter in my monitors horizontal and vertical refresh rates, plus then manually specify what resolutions my monitor could do, additionally state the size of my video card's ram. It was as elitest as operating systems really got, and we understood that.
Today, we find ourselves in the middle. Its not quite as plug and play as Windows or Macintosh, but its got some. Our minds are left thinking "Is this mainsteam or not?", and we don't know where to settle. Fedora installs the video drivers well for me the first time, but it was a nightmare getting Limewire to work.
So how does this relate? Well, because Linux isn't exclusively seen as an elitest operating system as much anymore and transitioning into something a little on the brain to use, we're seeing the depature of people from "Middle of the Road" distributions. Gentoo has its niche for the hardcore, but most distributions will attempt to make life as easy as possible for the user, a la Fedora or SUSE. They are trying to remove that middle ground and place themselves firmly into the "easy to use" category, while still retaining the power and flexibility Linux inherantly offers.
Those that did use Debian and the sort are moving on, they don't see the need for the elitest economy as much anymore, as Linux itself isn't as unique and hardcore as it once needed to be. We begin to see users use Linux not just to experiement on, but to actually use in a working environment, something to be taken a little more seriously.
In the end, the flourishment of distributions will begin to phase out, and personally I believe its for the better. We will be left with a handful, but those handful will have the attention of a much larger user and developer base, rather than having them spread thinly out. In the end, I believe this is a good thing. It looks like Debian may perhaps be one of the first examples.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
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.
"5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope..." One hyphenated word for that slapt-get. Any Debian user should be comfortable with that format.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov
It appears that the root cause of the low voter turnout in the most recent election of a leader for the Debian project is that all of the potential voters are still compiling the latest version of Firefox on their Gentoo boxes and are unable to access the Internet to submit their votes.
Strange, there was a link to this article on the front page of /. about two weeks ago. To quote
That doesn't sound all tailored for business - not that it's not suitable for business, but SuSE Pro remains a fantastic all round distro, with a guaranteed two year shelf life and a huge selection of packagaes. Novell have a preview of what will be included in SuSE 9.3 hereTry to upgrade her box from Windows 95 first. Any of Win2k and later OS doesn't crash without a good reason (such as h/w failure.)
Security-wise there may be reasons to give her a Linux box, but in general if you want minimum headache then Windows will work for her just fine. Just make a c: partition image on a spare, unmounted partition and restore it automatically every week :-) Everything else she needs must be on a USB Flash disk.
So, between the fact that not only is Debian getting publicly ridiculed by leaders of the Free Software Movement (such as Bruce Parens, IIRC) for the lenth of time it's taken them to release Sarge; but now they can't even stir up enough interest to get people to vote for posistions inside their own company?
I love Debian, and I used to use it before I switched to OpenBSD, but I honestly wonder if the project shouldn't hand over their resources to a vibrant and living project such as gentoo or ubuntu and step aside gracefully.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
In-N-Out Buger's menu consists of *nothing* but burgers, fries, and shakes, all of the highest quality...
only 199 of 960 active developers had voted -- well down on the 315 who had cast ballots at the same stage last year.
2. Mandrake: (..) 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.
/that/.
Yeah, that's right, you're paying for their job. You can get the sources. Do you want everything free as in beer? F/OSS was never
Although I don't use Mandrake, last month I looked at it, and they were charging something like $22/year (or was it $122 ?) so you could just sit back on your chair and hit the update button. Is that tooooo much?
This mentality that Free Software is beer sucks. You can always patch your systems by hand, you know...If you want somebody to manage all those changes for you, you pay. It's a reasonable model, it keeps people working and the software flowing.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
- Ubuntu is not susceptible to viruses and spyware.
- For $0 he gets a complete operating system and set of applications, saving him around $1000.
- It works.
- I have little inclination to provide support for MS based systems, so by running Ubuntu he gets me interested.
He bravely started off with the first release (warty) of Ubuntu. There were a few minor glitches (mainly that the graphical modem configuration didn't work, so I had to do it for him from the a bash prompt, and the web browser didn't have java and flash installed by default) but the whole process went remarkably smoothly. My expectation is that the imminent second release (hoary) will be polished enough that my father could do an installation by himself.In short, ditch the windows. For a typical home user Ubuntu can do everything windows can only more reliably, better and cheaper. (No doubt others will offer conflicting opinions.)
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?
And I get modded down as troll for pointing it out. Nice moderating. Again.
...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.
Debian confirms it?
I'll cast my vote again when I'm good and ready, and only once it's been ported to twelve different platforms.
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.
And by the time his father has bought Photoshop, Illustrator, and Microsoft Office, how much as he paid? Lets be generous and say that the missing features in the Linux equivalents are worth half the price. Still sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Those ability to play those great activeX games is also known as "Open Invitation for Viruses and Spyware". So, given the feature/misfeature balance, I'd have to say that the inability to play them is a feature. The only reason 'average Joe' doesn't think the same is that he doesn't understand that there's a link between those two things.
As for printer support, you're pretty sadly misinformed. It's pretty easy to get a non-Postscript printer working with Linux. I've walked many people through doing it with even old versions.
Free tech support is worth its weight in gold. If his father can get it by using Linux when he can't use Windows, I say use Linux.
You're probably a troll anyway.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I think you fundamentally mischaracterize Debian when you look at it as some kind of bleeding edge system for hackers and nerds.
Debian and its package management system is still the easiest way of keeping a software installation up to date, for anybody, hacker or not. SuSE and RedHat are trying, but they aren't as good or easy to use yet.
And Windows and Macintosh aren't even trying to do anything comparable--software installation and maintenance on those platforms is in complete shambles compared to Linux.
I had not yet voted when this announcement went out. (I have now, however.) The main reason I took so long to get my vote in is that the number of candidates (and the number of new candidates, since the incumbent isn't running) is higher than it has been in recent years, and I needed extra time to figure out who they all were, and how I thought they should be ranked. The last few elections, I had a fairly good idea of how I was going to vote before I even started looking at the candidates in detail. This year, it was a really tough choice, and I had to spend a lot more time on it. So, I wouldn't read too much into the low turnout at this point.
Yeah, it's great until you have to install software not on the installation CDs. Dependency hell...
Visit www.doc2pdf.net for a free, no need to register,
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).
...they're running Debian Vote Stable.
They'll catch up with the current vote in two or three years.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Your right, my bad. Sid not Sarge. But I still stand by my point. The longer it takes to release the less that will go into the "less stable" releases. And yea Ubuntu certainly does have the cash to hold on. But that was never the project's goal and Debian tanking like it is certainly isn't good for all the projects based off it.
Something has changed at Debian. Debian users have gone from touting Debian as a great distro to touting Debian as something to base your distro off of.
And just to point something out people are not upset that its been a few years since a release. They are upset because the project has run off the rails and is being totally mismanged. Users can excuse delaying a bit to "get things right", but you can't keep fucking up over and over and expect users to keep understanding why you can't manage to get a release out.
Thats:
;-)
apt-get install vote
Ya Gentoo freak!
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Until recently I would've agreed with you on the matter of servers (running Debian stable for a desktop is IMO utterly hopeless).
My view recently changed when I realised that most of the system I was operating was from backports.org not Debian stable. To get some of the basics I needed I was having to go out to 3rd party repositories - ones with no guarantee of security support.
I agree with your view about ABI compatibility, but as a developer also understand why. That constant breaking of compatibility is one of the reasons open source software can develop so fast. Having to worry about working around a bugs and limitations in older versions of libtiff or libxml would be yet another slowdown. It's quite possible to install multiple versions of libraries in parallel, too, thanks to the soname versioning scheme in *nix, though few distributors package more than one version of a library.
It's not just ABI compatibility too, though, it's compatibility with "old bugs" and with API changes.
To be honest, it sounds a lot like what you want is FreeBSD. I've been tempted to try it out for similar reasons myself - dead stable, small "OS", easily upgraded extra userspace. That's pretty much what I want - like having "woody" for the core OS, but "sarge" for the rest, w/o the nightmares that entails when you try to do it on Debian (IMHO it's impressive they've made it work at all).
Backports could satisfy the same role - the "ports" collection in fbsd - but it doesn't seem to have all that much coverage or all that much enthusiasm behind it.
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
While I generally agree with your views, I can't entirely agree on the matter of developers. In my view, in the context of the Debian distribution, a "developer" has quite a different set of required skills.
;-)
A Debian developer - think "person who develops packages for Debian" - needs to be able to work with the Debian packaging system, needs to know quite a bit about porting apps to different archs, and needs to be a build system wizard. They don't need to know how to write a linked list in C - but they might need to know how to correctly replace all str[something-weird]* calls with another flavour or fix assumptions in the upstream source that cause a dependence on Solaris's libc.
I know quite a few very good developers who could't make a package for any distro to save their life. I also know quite a few skilled package maintainers whose ability to fix others' code is often astonishing despite their relative lack of traditional programming expertise. I also know a fair few people (myself included) who think that if you're implementing a linked list, you need to get over your NIH syndrome and discover the wonder of libraries, and/or get a higher-level language
Overall - I'm not convinced "Debian developer" is the best title, when "package maintainer" is often more accurate, but many of these folks deserve the term Developer as much as whoever hacks out the original package.
Ah, drat - you're an AC anyway. May as well post this given that I've already written it.
The day that debian dies would be a sad day for the OSS community and the linux community as a whole. Debian a very very nice distribution however for a while now it seems like it's lacking a stron leader and this results in insanelly long times between releases and very strange decisions from the development team. The notorious no java and no xorg thing are really hurting debian. And as a result Ubunty came arround a picked up a buck of the developers that were starting to get frustrated with debian. So it was right that the elections show that there is a serious problem with the way the project is going. But then again like I have said before OSS is about the best project surviving and this is exactly what's happening with Debian and Ubunty. After all in order for any project to survive you have to be devoted to it and not treat it as your 2nd hobby. Debians lack of release scedule has been hurting it for years now and the results are really showing now that there is actually a good alternative. I don't like some of the decisions that the Ubuntu team makes (like jumping head over heals in new versions of project) however the truth is that Ubuntu has been the fastest growing linux distribution over the last year and things are looking really good for the project. They have finally gotten the debian things to work like they do in linux and despite the fact that they use sudo and Gnome 2.10 (which both are really pissing me off) Ubuntu is a very good distribution and a lot better option than runnig unstable Debian which breaks stuff a little bit too often for mu taste. But don't count debian out just yet. There is a plan for speeding up the release schedule by dropping a lot of the architectures ( or turning them into sub projects) and other things like that. Debian has survived for a very long time and hopefully these elections will be a wakeup call for the dev team. If not I would have to switch to Ubuntu despite all the small *problems*.
Please, people: stop the panic. T'was only one year ago that Debian was the "fastest growing distribution"[1] according to the almighty Netcraft.
And all of a sudden it's dying?
Please....
Kind regards...
Maarten
[1] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/01/28/debia n_fastest_growing_linux_distribution.html