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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.
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...
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.
MEPIS, Ubuntu, Xandros? All three are based on Debian and a bit easier to use.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
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.
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.
apt get vote
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.
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 hereIn-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.
- 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?
...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?
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 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.
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.
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
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
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