Branden Robinson Lays Down the Law at Debian

darthcamaro writes "Newly elected Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson posted his first report as DPL. From the looks of it, Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand. In an interview on internetnews.com, though, Robinson talks about whether Debian should even hold onto any money at all. Holding onto cash is also likely not what those who donate to the Debian Project expect either, according to Robinson. "People who donate us money ... seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near-term, not towards establishing an endowment,' he said."

Comments

Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I don't see any problem with holding on to money for the long term, as long as they make this perfectly clear. Organizations like the Red Cross got into trouble because people donated money thinking they were donating money to x, when really they weren't.

Personally I would like to donate to Debian knowing that my money would be used on improving the server aspects of Debian and not be spent on making GNOME or KDE look pretty. They should adopt something similar to Crossover Office where you can choose what your money should be spent on.

Well bitching aside I love Debian, I am just Joe Sixpack and I haven't had to so much as touch my mailserver or audio server (Ampache) in a LONG ass time, my uptime is pressing on over a year.

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not "Joe Sixpack" if you have a debian server.

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what I get for trying to make FP, what I meant to write was that I'm the "Joe Sixpack" of sysadmins. I have a nice little protected LAN (Samba and Ampache) setup with the only outside access being the mailserver, ftp, and ssh. If someone started spamming me I would have no idea what to add to my iptables and have no idea how to otherwise thwart an attack other than "pull the plug." So anyway my point was supposed to be that I'm just your average Linux user... Joe Martini I suppose.

Re:Holding Out?

[thegamerformelyknown]

You make a good point, that is, a lot of people donate with a certain aspect in mind.

Why don't they make a form for you to fill out along with your donation. This goes into a poll, with 1 vote for every dollar or something spent.
That way, they can prioritize what the people who fund them want. Everyones happy!

Re:Holding Out?

[ilikejam]

Sounds like the US government.

Re:Holding Out?

[silentbozo]

Sounds like the US government.

Except we never really get to vote on spending. We vote representatives into office who immediately start ignoring us in favor of special interests (pick one - environmental lobby, business lobby, pro-welfare, anti-welfare, pro-military, pro-peace, interventionalists (both liberal and conservative), isolationists, etc.

Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willing to pay for? Instead, they treat us as piggy banks, to be shaken down on a monthly and yearly basis (quarterly if you run a business) for whatever pork barrel largesse needs to be funded.

I'd much rather donate and choose what to fund, than have somone forcibly* take the money and decide for me.

*Yes, taxes are voluntary. Up until the point where they start garnishing your wages and freezing your accounts.

Re:Holding Out?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Right. You can call him

struct JOE {
char l33t_j03:3;
} joe = {006};

Re:Holding Out?

[iabervon]

Organizations like the Red Cross got into trouble because people donated money thinking they were donating money to x, when really they weren't.

If they wanted to donate money to X, maybe they ought to have sent it to, say, Debian...

But, in general, organizations hate it when you donate money for a specific purpose, because that purpose invariably goes out of date before the money is entirely spent. For example, the server aspects of Debian are already so good that you don't bother to change them; what good does throwing more money at that do?

Re:Holding Out?

[DenDave]

I agree for the most part. Especially as the current situation is such that (K)ubuntu appears to be taking care of the debian desktop market, perhaps the debian core group could really focus on updating the core aspects and server side. Of course a ppc installer that supports firewire disk installs is always a sure way to get me interested ;) (and no, I don't want YellowShnog on an Ipod)

Me's gonna pop my 5$ in the pot for Debian, and you?

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess everything in debian must be that good, otherwise why wouldn't they have updated in 3 years?

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Debian runs you!

Re:Holding Out?

[smokeslikeapoet]

This is how my church does it. There is a tithe, that's the 10% you hear about a lot of Christians giving to the church. This money goes to the day to day operation, utility bills, pastor's salary. Then there's the building fund which covers future repairs, expansion, etc. Then there's the "Love Offering" which goes to world missions and the like. I said all that to say this. Debian, if the users so wish could hold different money in different accounts. If a user wanted to contribute to the operating fund, the infrastructure fund, or the benevolence/outreach fund, he/she could earmark it for those causes.

Re:Holding Out?

[badfish99]

I think he means that the US government is controlled by whichever corporations pay it the most money.

Since what you pay in tax isn't voluntary, you don't get a vote.

Re:Holding Out?

[grahamlee]

Which of the Linux kernels are you using that hasn't had a security hole fixed in the previous year? Thanks.

Re:Holding Out?

[cerberusss]

Personally I would like to donate to Debian knowing that my money would be used on improving the server aspects of Debian/i>

Although it's a commercial entity, they should have something like CodeWeaver's Compatibility database. This is the entry for MS Project 2002 and it has two pledges at $119 or so.

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, what?

Re:Holding Out?

[grahamlee]

In reference to his "over a year of uptime". My servers tend to get uptimes of a few months, because I like to patch security issues.

Re:Holding Out?

[ffub]

"Organizations like the Red Cross got into trouble because people donated money thinking they were donating money to x, when really they weren't."

This was more the other way around. People donated to the Tsunami appeal. Because that appeal was specific, the Red Cross were only allowed to use that money for the tsunami's relief operation. They had enough money and wanted to divert some to other appeals, they had to ask permission for this and make the public aware. Which they did...

Re:Holding Out?

[cortana]

> I haven't had to so much as touch my mailserver or audio server (Ampache) in a
> LONG ass time, my uptime is pressing on over a year.

What's your email address? ;)

Re:Holding Out?

[Nexx]

Most of my security issues have been away from the kernel, so it's:

1. stop affected daemon
2. patch affected daemon
3. restart affected daemon

See? No restarts necessary :)

As always, YMMV

Re:Holding Out?

[John Hasler]

> Personally I would like to donate to Debian
> knowing that my money would be used on improving
> the server aspects of Debian and not be spent on
> making GNOME or KDE look pretty.

We don't spend any money making anything look pretty.

Re:Holding Out?

[grahamlee]

It's good when that's possible, but it isn't always so. Easier on HURD-based systems than on Linux, especially. I remember a local DoS exploit which (I think) involved the SIGALRM handler, that was a kernel vulnerability that needed a reboot to fix.

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's not it at all. When you(or a corporation) pay taxes to the US government you don't get a say in how that money is spent(well, not really). This leads some(like those wacky libertarians) to propose that government projects should be payed for entirely by voluntary contributions. So instead of voting on a referendum to build a new freeway overpass that would be payed for with money taken from everyone, you would instead make a contribution to an overpass fund. If enough funds are raised then the overpass gets build. If enough funds are not raised, then no overpass. If you enact a system like this, then you have a situation where government is controlled by whoever is willing to pay the most money(like you said).

Re:Holding Out?

[Nexx]

Absolutely. Alternatively, all the servers that do Real Work (tm) can live behind a firewall, so Most Things Won't Affect Me (famous last words, that :) )

Re:Holding Out?

[timeOday]

Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willing to pay for?

I dunno about that. Our biggest expense is social security, medicare, and medicaid, and they're so popular that changing them is almost impossible.

Then there's military. I seem to recall Zell Miller getting quite a bit of applause in the Republican primary by accusing Kerry of trying to cut funding for the B1 and B2 bombers, leaving us to fight terrorism with "spitballs". Personally I don't think a $1 billion (per copy) bomber is the right way to defend against a $2 box cutter but Miller's comments obviously didn't hurt his party too much.

In short, I think our taxes are largely consistent with taxpayer wishes.

Re:Holding Out?

[0racle]

You must be behind on some kernel patches.

Re:Holding Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to your girlfriend ;-)

Re:Holding Out?

[Bulk Tape Eraser]

organizations hate it when you donate money for a specific purpose,

Also because then it can't be used for office equipment and/or free drinks in the break room refrigerator.

Many, many organizations form around 'worthy causes' but quickly become self-serving.

I don't think Debian fits into this category at all, but certainly a LOT of 'charitable' operations do.

Re:Holding Out?

[cthulhu11]

The idea of a "prudent reserve" is entirely reasonable.

Re:Holding Out?

[Lars T.]

He said: who pays the most money (to the government), not who pays the most taxes.

What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that we have bittorrent they can drop the ISO mirror farm.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way the bandwidth is donated. That's not where the money goes probably.

Maybe on travel to conferences and new hardware for compatability? I'm sure it's documented somewhere.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[krmt]

Maybe on travel to conferences and new hardware for compatability?

That's exactly it actually. Sending people to debconf (the debian conference) or for new hardware or replacement parts for old hardware. Also to ship donated hardware to people who'll put it to good use for the project.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone uses Bittorrent.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[gabebear]

Some of us still need the ISO farm. ETSU blocks bittorrent in their dorms and I imagine a lot of other schools do to. ETSU is just stupid about what they block from the dorms though recently. You can't even access the campus SMTP server from the dorms now!!! and they don't plan on ever changing it so students can....

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and here's one more reason why smart students wouldn't consider going to ETSU...

Re:What do they need the money for?

[courseB]

does that mean i am smart for dropping out after 3 weeks? haha

Re:What do they need the money for?

[BlueHands]

the mistake is validating the colleges that do that. bittorrent is THE way to do so many things that the fewer places that cater to such actions the better. Bittorrent-esqu tech is coming to everywhere in time because it make too much sense, not to mention money, not to. any place that blocks it is going to suffer.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[bioglaze]

Bittorrent is also blocked in the university of Turku (Finland) student dorms. Ok, when it wasn't blocked, it took about 60% of upload bandwidth, so they really needed to do something about it, but total blocking sucks.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Paradise Pete]

Not everyone uses Bittorrent.

Not yet, anyway.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Cramer]

And just what do you suggest they do about it? They have no idea what you may be trading -- legal or not. So, how is the IT staff supposed to know which BT packets are "good" and which are "bad"?

This is exactly where ftp mirroring came from... instead of 100 downloads of the same thing, host a local mirror for those 100 that doesn't consume any external bandwidth (beyond the mirror process itself) -- and in most cases, it's faster, too. This has lead to the current world of web proxies (aka "web accelerator".) The difference is, it's easy to intercept ftp and http and know what you're asking for. Bittorrent is much more difficult to "proxy", as such. ('tho, I know of at least one company that makes a box to do it.)

[FWIW, one doesn't even need to intercept http. Akamai does it with DNS-fu.]

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

They certainly do have an idea what you are trading, and 99% of is "bad".

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Hast]

Quite a lot of universities ban Bittorrent. And no, you can't just change ports, they look at the traffic.

I bet there are lots of other places that also ban BT, and for all of us it would be nice if HTTP/FTP downloads are still around.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never gotten the speed out of the Torrent that I have out of the ISO mirrors.

'nuff said

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be an insanely crappy idea. Bandwidth is not a problem. Most countries have universities which mirror the stuff.

BT is much slower than your local mirror.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[fishyfool]

i download ten+ gigs a month. *NONE* of it is music or movies. it's linux distros and my personal photos. i upload the same with bittorrent, what's the problem?

Re:What do they need the money for?

[turbidostato]

"how is the IT staff supposed to know which BT packets are "good" and which are "bad"?"

I don't know. But I DO know one thing. What am I uploading/downloading is not AT ANY RATE something IT staff has anything to do with. That is MY data and MY bussiness, not theirs.

I don't know about the USA, but surely enough that's the way things are in civilized parts of the world like, to name one, Turku.

Being said that, usage trends of IT fabrics IS IT staff bussiness; One thing they can do, for instance is shape traffic usage so everybody takes a fair portion of the cake (while it is easily just to close down port ranges for IP blocks that's neither "the proper way" nor something within tech staff duties; it is simpy "the lazy cheap way"). How they take advantage of his part of the case is enterily up to them; if they use it for something dubious or illegal, that's bussiness between them and police, certainly not between them and IT staff.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

so they really needed to do something about it

It's called "traffic shaping", dumbass.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[Cramer]

• That is MY data and MY bussiness, not theirs.

Incorrect. It's their network and their connectivity costs. If a University or business blocks specific types of traffic, it's perfectly legal and justified. See, they aren't even pretending to be "common carriers" which means they are legaly responsible for what happens from their network(s).

ISPs are a different jar of monkeys. The instant they begin policing one type of traffic, they are no longer a common carrier and are no longer protected as such. If they filter one type of traffic, they can be legal required to filter every other type of traffic.

That said, universities are blocking p2p traffic because it eats up most of the bandwidth. And bandwidth most certainly ain't free. Do you want your tuiton and fees to go up because the school now needs an OC-12 to handle all the p2p uers? Or your taxes which is where most of the money for state run schools come from.

No one has said anything about port blocking. Bittorrent packets are very easily identified and blocked. It doesn't matter what port it's on.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[turbidostato]

"Incorrect. It's their network and their connectivity costs"

Then if I say it's 'my data' and 'my bussiness', how the hell can I be incorrect and corrected by saying "nay, it's 'their network' and its 'their connectivity costs'"?

Last time I checked, 'my data' != 'their network' and 'my bussiness' != 'their connectivity costs'.

"If a University or business blocks specific types of traffic, it's perfectly legal and justified."

Yes... up to a point. Being the point that no university has any bussiness about my private data. They, of course, can disallow my private data being hosted, or travelling through, their fabrics (up to the limits stablished by local laws), but if they allow it (like in a student dorm), all they can do is take care of their bussiness (fixing alotted bandwith, for instance) but, again, my data is not their bussiness.

"That said, universities are blocking p2p traffic because it eats up most of the bandwidth"

Yes, I know, and that I already called "the lazy cheap way". If the University is worried about everybody having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs, then make sure everybody is having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs! But once you (ie the University) have decided that a given portion is for my private use, then you are nobody to further fiscalize how my "private use" is; if you allott me 10Kbs, that's OK, let it be 10Kbs, but don't tell me if it should be HTTP, SMTP, SSH or whatever even child pornography*1, as harsh as it might sound, that's not your bussiness!

*1 Of course while me exchanging child pornography is not the "carrier" bussines, it will be police's one, and if police traces it to the University THEN they can come with a judicial order to sniff my traffic for instance. But only under founded suspicion about an illegallity and only under legal judicial knowledge and approval.

Re:What do they need the money for?

[gabebear]

ETSU actually doesn't technically "Block" Bittorrent packets. It uses a Packateer to "traffic shape" and assigns a rediculously low priority to bittorrent(we are talking 1-2k/s when it doesn't just drop them completely. SMTP is actaully blocked though, the bastards...

With the amount of bittorrent traffic that can be generated at a University, traffic shaping isn't really much different then blocking.

There's only one thing to do.

[crottsma]

40 thousand dollar?! This is what Texas Holdem's all about!!

So?

[TelJanin]

I doubt many people expect their money to be spent immediately. Much better for the Debian team to keep a nice cushion in case of a major problem than to suddenly say "Shits, we ran out of money. Now what do we do?"

Re:So?

[dougsk]

I think someone else ran out of 'small' benefactors and publicly posted this i nattempt to get more small benefactors and it 'seemed' to work.

Million Bucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

When asked what he would do if someone donated a million dollars, Branden Robinson promptly responded, "two chicks at the same time man!"

Re:Million Bucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

two chicks at the same time should cost a lot less than that, depending a lot on how attractive they are.

Re:Million Bucks?

[cmstremi]

Way to miss the Office Space reference, dickwad.

Re:Million Bucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was to busy fucking Lumberg

Re:Million Bucks?

[Mancat]

Only two?

Re:Million Bucks?

[vwjeff]

When asked what he would do if someone donated a million dollars, Branden Robinson promptly responded, "two chicks at the same time man!"

Fuckin A

Re:Million Bucks?

[A beautiful mind]

New SMP support for debian kernels? YAY!

Broke?

[Attackman]

Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand
I can only wish I was broke like that. Usually, I wind up eating canned chili for a week, not with 40 grand in my pocket.

(yes, I realize that's broke for a major project, but seeing broke and 40 thou in the same sentence still messes with my head).

Re:Broke?

[psamuels]

yes, I realize that's broke for a major project

It's not. Debian has very little need for money. Hardware? Donated. Bandwidth? Donated. Staff? Volunteer, or in a few cases salaried by companies with an interest in Debian. Conferences? Sponsored by those same companies. I'm sure there are things the Project could do with a huge budget, but all in all there are a lot more needy nonprofits out there.

Re:Broke?

[daft_one]

Ooooo, look at Mr. Fancypants with his "chili" in a "can." *bitterly goes back to his ungarnished rice*

Re:Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well exuse me your highness, canned chili, oh yes, canned chili not good enough for you? Shall I fetch the butler, mayhaps he can bring you the pate to hold you until the foie gras is ready. Should I open the Clos du Mesnil or are you going to wait for ladyship?

Mean while back in middle America I open a 10 cent package of Raman Noodles

I kid, I kid...

Re:Broke?

[Feztaa]

Yeah, the old KD / PBJ dinners here. I wouldn't mind being $40k broke, no sir, not at all.

Re:Broke?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Makes me wonder what the value of their assets are, and if one shouldn't evaluate the donated time as if it were a revenue stream (even though it isn't really liquid, it replaces what a commercial company would have to direct a portion of their revenue stream towards paying for). Their debt/equity ratio is probably zero :-) It is, at the very least, an incredible organizational experiment.

Re:Broke?

[cptgrudge]

If you have some time, making your own wheat bread for those sandwiches can be cheaper than buying it. Plus, you get that freshly baked bread aroma.

Re:Broke?

[Herkum01]

Look at Mr. Daft, wasting all that money on rice when there is a good pile of grass clippings right outside! ;P

Re:Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just go upstairs and raid mom's cupboards.

Re:Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod! I can't AFFORD grass clippings! I have to settle for Ramen noodles!

Everybody loves Ramen!

Re:Broke?

[mrjb]

Mean while back in middle America I open a 10 cent package of Raman Noodles Raw, I presume?

Re:Broke?

[lanc]

Hardware? Donated.

How do you know? Did you donate some?

Staff? Volunteer, or in a few cases salaried by companies with an interest in Debian.

erm and those would be for example...? I mean the whole debian projekt has 40 thou. If Firms would be that interested, the project wouldn't lack the money. I think this is a typical humann attitude problem again. Hey, we can use this nice piece of software for free! Mwhahaha! Idiots, we'll make lots of money based on their effort! Erm, but what is this silly verb 'donating'?

Conferences? Sponsored by those same companies.

I seriously doubt this. Noone ever (ok, or really few does) invites any Debian-related staff/thing in the commercial world. They want RH. They wan SuSE. They want support, to be able to blame someone if things go wrong. They want someone outside of the firm to carry technical responsibility.

Re:Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Ramen/Raymond/
<except me>

Re:Broke?

[John Hasler]

> How do you know?

I know that most Debian hardware is donated because I am a Debian developer and I pay attention. Some is purchased out of Debian funds held by SPI.

> rm and those would be for example...?

Brainfood, HP, Progeny, Canonical, among others, pay people to work on Debian.

> I seriously doubt this.

Doubt away, but it is true that companies finance Debian attendence at conferences. The Debconf conferences are underwritten by companies such as Linspire. Companies such as HP regularly fund Debian representation at Linux expositions and conferences. Debian is a member of several associations such as OASIS, and businesses often underwrite the expenses associated with these. Bandwidth and hosting is donated by organizations that use Debian.

> They want support, to be able to blame someone
> if things go wrong. They want someone outside
> of the firm to carry technical responsibility.

They can purchase support from any of the consultants and companies that sell Debian support.

All of this can be confirmed by searching the Debian Web sites and archives.

Re:Broke?

[Daniel]

Believe it or not, it's the truth. See, for instance, the list of hardware donors, official mirror hosts, and partners (companies that have given significant resources to the project). I also know that the conferences have been sponsored by Lindows (excuse me, Linspire), and several prominent developers work for HP, Progeny, and Ubuntu.

Daniel

Re:Broke?

[Genom]

Grass Clippings? You pampered clod! We're too poor to have Clippings...we have to GNAW the grass off the ground ourselves!

Sheesh...you people expect *everything* to be done for you, even clipping the grass... ;P

Re:Broke?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Maybe the could use the money to package up software newer than 10 years old.

Re:Broke?

[lanc]

OK, I'm convinced - sorry, I was a bit prejudice-driven.

Re:Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ho ho ho!

What a fucking knee-slapper! Debian releases old packages! I've never heard that before.

Re:Broke?

[Mex]

Ungarnished rice?

Luxury.

I had to learn to hunt and kill the mice that creep around my machine's warm processor to nourish myself.

Re:Broke?

[burnunit0]

at least you had an inside for your grass clippings to be outside of

Re:Broke?

[Feztaa]

I dunno, my dad had a bread maker, we could never get it quite right. The bread was always too thick, and really crusty.

Out of all the expenses in my day to day life, spending 99 cents on a loaf of bread isn't a huge concern. It's when I go to Subway and spend $9 for a foot-long sub, bottle of coke, and a couple cookies that's really hurting my budget (considering that's what I do for lunch every day that I go to work... on my days off and for meals before/after work, I just eat whatever cheapo food is available around the house).

Umm, yeah...

[Eil]

Sure wish I was flat broke with $40,000 on hand.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[whiteranger99x]

Yeah and when that happens, I'll bet you that the McDonalds 29 cent hamburger will cost $290,000 :P

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Fjornir]

I haven't been in a McDonalds in something like 15 years. Do they actually have a 29 cent hamburger?

Re:Umm, yeah...

[whiteranger99x]

last time i checked they did...of course, they have some other shit there too.

Did they have the McRib back then? lol

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Fjornir]

Damn. That's scary. I mean the 'beef' alone should cost more than that -- never mind prep time, the bun, condiments, the lights, rent on the store, ... They must be selling a lot of overpriced sugar water to balance that out. Or do they actually turn a profit on that burger?

I got no clue about the mcrib. I had a chicken nugget -- and it was frightening how _good_ it tasted and how bad my stomach felt an hour later.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[whiteranger99x]

Haha, leave it to me to start an offtopic thread about McDonald's...im sure you don't want me to bring up their blurb about pushing Drive Thru order in under 30 seconds.

Chicken McNuggets are the epitome of evil my friend ;)

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have a $.29 hamburger, anyway. There isn't a single item on their menu that cheap.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Deeze]

"last time i checked they did"

Man, it's obviously been a long time since you've been to McD's. Last time *I* checked, burgers were like, 89 cents.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[whiteranger99x]

Alright, alright, obviously it was one of their promotions that I was thinking of.

You're right, it's been a long time since I've been to McD's, I'm sorry, I value my sense of taste and my colon too much (not really, I eat junk at other chains) :P

Re:Umm, yeah...

[lanc]

Sure, with todos like organizing one of the worlds biggest distributions' release, cooperating and coordinating couple of hundred developers, supporting 11 architectures, and so on. It's not like getting yourself some bread to eat, it's a giant community.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

ast time i checked they did [have a 29-cent hamburger] ...of course, they have some other shit there too.

"Shit" being the operative word.
Who knows what's in their "hamburgers"?

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Just Some Guy]

$40,000 ain't so hot if you're $500,000 in debt. Not that Debian is, mind you, but numbers without context are just pixels on a monitor.

Re:Umm, yeah...

[Eil]

Good point. I meant my original post to be humorous (as it was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article), but it seems nobody took it that way. Have to remember the smily next time!

Ubuntu Linux...

[TheDarkener]

I just installed Ubuntu last night, which is based on Debian. It is Debian, with what you really want in it that isn't. Hardware detection, modern packages.

Time brings change!

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeap, everything I want. You know, like a sane package system, sane init script setup, and kde...

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes of course, it is NOTHING like Debian. It's not like they use similar package managers or repositories, and they most certainly don't use ANY of the same packages, especially the non-free ones, you know, little known software like mplayer, and mldonkey. And the installers are most certainly NOTHING alike.

I can't BEGIN to imagine why ANYONE would think they were related.

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Said with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy accent:
Oh yes of course, it is NOTHING like Debian. It's not like they use similar package managers or repositories, and they most certainly don't use ANY of the same packages, especially the non-free ones, you know, little known software like mplayer, and mldonkey. And the installers are most certainly NOTHING alike.

I can't BEGIN to imagine why ANYONE would think they were related.

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Queer eye for the wha???

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I think you misspelled 'Debian sid'.

Re:Ubuntu Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

THe last time I installed debian, it had hardware detection, modern packages, everything just worked. What more do you want?

To be part of the flock, that what. Fucking wanker.

Please!!

[XanC]

Finish Sarge!

Re:Please!!

[natrius]

Come on now, this is insightful? Everyone knows sarge isn't out yet, and I don't see how saying "finish sarge" is going to get it out any faster. Why don't you help? I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation, whether it's money, code or documentation.

Re:Please!!

[zokahn]

Amen brother!!!! Stop staring at your wallet and bring on the good stuff.

Re:Please!!

[diamondsw]

It's a sad sign when "Finish Sarge!" is marked as +4 Funny.

Re:Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wait? Get it now.

Re:Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarge is still a bit unstable... it's subject to change at the moment.

Re:Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarge is still a bit unstable...

Compared to SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, Fedora, et al, it's rock stable.

Re:Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, lameass, the people working on Sarge read Slashdot regularly, just to see how XanC is doing.
I'm sure that they will work twice as hard getting Sarge out the door, now that they've seen XanC'x post.

Re:Please!!

[Urusai]

Perhaps ironic, that Debian's versions are named after characters in a movie of long, long ago.

What's $40K worth now a days

[BrainSurgeon]

That might be able to buy some coffee and snacks for an all night coding session and that's about it! Dump the cash!

Seriously, $40k will not go far even for an OSS project like this.

Re:Debian is dying.

[geminidomino]

Dude, if you're going to blatantly rip off another post and cut and paste it, at least delete the domain identifiers ([samag.com][amdest.com]) so we don't know there USED to be links there. ;)

I get scared when people 'acronymize' their title

[Frennzy]

It has always seemed to me that when people start referring to themselves as a TLA (three letter acronym) that they tend to lose touch with the people they work with.

I don't know this guy, and I don't know much about what he is doing, but the tone and inflection of his statement seems to be self-aggrandizing...to me at least. I'm not flaming him, I'm just stating an opinion of how I read the text. Honestly, I don't really give a rat's ass about this Debian debate...but I do see why someone could use this particular article as ammunition to attack his credibility.

Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit

[psamuels]

What? You're referring to "DPL" for Debian Project Leader? Dude, we've all called the DPL the DPL as long as there has been one.

Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article.

[Anonymous Coward]

keep in mind that Brandon Robinson neither 'laid down the law' or meantioned anything about being 'broke'.

He said, matter of factly, that he is trying to figure out Debian's assest held for it by different originizations. "Software in the Public Interest" (SPI) has 40,000 dollars, and that's a Debian offshoot. Debian originazation in Britian has another 4 thousand and various other moneys are spread around in places like Brazil.

He didn't say that it was enough, or more then enough, or less then enough, or that Debian is broke or Debian is rich or anything like that.

The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.

Re:Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article.

[Anonymous Coward]

than
than
than
THAN

Re:Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article.

[Anonymous Coward]

organisations
organisations
organisations
organisations
ORGANISATIONS


...or organizations for you Americans out there.

Re:Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article.

[bit01]

The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.

Probably an attempt at FUD by a marketing parasite.

M$ has a multi-billion dollar per year incentive to compromise forums like /. . Even a slight percentage change in customer attitudes can mean a big absolute change in the bottom line.

---

Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product

Typo?

[Slant675]

Hmm, I noticed that the quote said "put to work for us." Perhaps he meant "for use?" That just sounded wrong.

Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit

[Frennzy]

We have? Really?

ALL of us?

Damn...I must have been high that week that every Debian geek was in agreement about something.

A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is the only maintained distro I'm aware of that still supports Alpha, let alone MIPS or other "non-standard" CPUs. I can appreciate the "let's light a fire under the developer's asses" rhetoric, but that doesn't solve pressing problems, like a lack of builds for "orphan" architectures. There are people out there that still want a Linux distro that works for their machine, and they don't always run x86; maybe this guy should invest a few $$$ on eBay to get some servers for different arches that are "going away" (or at least are not going to receive as much attention). That would certainly be a better use of $40k; and if done right, it shouldn't cost more than $2k, tops.

Well ...

[Sonic McTails]

Debian's main source of income are donations. However, Debian-stable hasn't been updated now in 2-3 years. Most people I know don't use Debian anymore because stable is SO old, can't, or don't want to bother using testing or unstable. If they want money, make a damn release, or die. It's really THAT simple.

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I've been using stable for about 3 years and I like it fine... I would not want testing on my server.

The only thing I dislike are the old libraries which make it a pain to install newer programs.

Re:Well ...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal. Or run mostly stable, and just upgrade select items to testing, and other select items to unstable. Hell, if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, CVS and compile and help with testing. I couldn't imagine anyone running debian stable unless it was critical to be *rock-solid* stable. Which means heavy load servers, in my mind.

I moved from Mandrake to Debian because I like estoeric math software. I ran into trouble with Mandrake where I could get some stuff from Mandrake's unstable, but I couldn't satisfy all the dependencies. What is the point of having an RPM if it can't be installed? Debian allowed me to install a ton of stuff with apt-get that I was having to download tarballs to try install. I admit I *love* debian :-)

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I had mod points to mod that up.

Exactly right. I run Debian Stable with select items from Unstable (mono, ASP.NET); and it beautifully picks just the dependancies I needed to get the bleeding edge stuff I want and the stable stuff from stable.

I ended up with a system that exactly fits my needs. Modern in the components I know. Stable in the components I neither know nor care about and I want to "just work".

Re:Well ...

[samjam]

I moved to ubunto because it had up to date python4 packages which I needed for pymusique, and used x.org x server, but thats about it.

Its behind on kernel releases, I need 2.6.11 to support my USB drive and the best Ubuntu has is 2.6.11.1, and Ubunto doesn't even have Firefox 1.03 out yet.

Previous to that I was using a de-mepis'd Mepis become testing/unstable and it was very stable. (Mepis was also falling behind the times)

My testing/unstable was running recent 2.6.11 releases and doing well.

So I didn't gain much by moving to ubuntu at all, as I now use allofmp3.com instead of pyMusique, as iTunes music catalogue is sadly deficient in too many areas.

Sam

Re:Well ...

[zCyl]

Windows 98 hasn't been updated now in about 5 years. Most people I know don't use Windows anymore because 98 is SO old. If Microsoft wants to make more money, they need to make a damn release, or die. It's really THAT simple.

</paraphrase>

(Or maybe you could try running testing? It works fine, you know.)

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal.

The issue is that a fair percentage of people want a balance between something fairly up-to-date and stable. Using testing or unstable implies using something that's, well, being tested or unstable. If testing and unstable aren't being actively tested or actually unstable, then why are they called that?

Perhaps there should be an additional catagory, like Really, Really Stable and Stable Enough, or Old Stable and New Stable.

Or hell, everyone knows (or everyone who should know knows) that the current Debian Stable is rock solid, so retire it (call it Debian Legacy or something) and move on. Move testing to stable, unstable to testing and creating a new unstable branch. Anyone who needs Absolute Rock Solid Stable should know to use Debian Legacy, everyone else would use Debian Stable.

Just do it, you can't stay in the 20th century forever.

Re:Well ...

[nametaken]

Exactly. I hear everyone yelling to just use testing/unstable. But seriously, if those are really that solid, make a new release! If they're not, then the entire process is indeed painfully slow and the distro will likely wither and die.

I'm also reading here that the guy didn't actually say they're "broke". Which is good, because I'd choke if I heard about a volunteer project with no expenses crying elephant tears over only 40k.

Re:Well ...

[jesterzog]

Most people I know don't use Debian anymore because stable is SO old, can't, or don't want to bother using testing or unstable. If they want money, make a damn release, or die.

Most people I know well who use linux run Debian sarge, or a hybrid system, including me. (That's about four or five people.) It still works great for a personal workstation and whatever the label, it is relatively stable compared with some other distros.

Support isn't an issue because it's a personal workstation in a distro that's realisically aimed at people who have some level of technical competancy to manage their systems and resolve problems from time to time. If you can deal with the package maintainers and the upstream developers, let alone post the odd question in a forum, you're still getting large amounts of unofficial support that (in most cases) beats anything official.

The installer isn't an issue because, for me at least, it's already installed... and the unofficial Debian installer (in sarge) is still quite reasonable if it isn't perfect.

As another response said, I really don't get this attitude. Debian might not be the best distro for you, or "stable" Debian might not be the best distro for you, and there are certainly some policies that may need reviewing for the future.

Claiming it's going to die, however, just because you personally and friends in your local community see no use for it, is silly. Sarge is still a perfectly workable and mostly up-to-date distro for a lot of people, even if it's somehow trendy on slashdot to bash the project right now. For many, including myself, making it officially stable is irrelevant. All that will do from my perspective is allow for some new packages to flood into testing and unstable.

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about security updates? As far as I remember Ubuntu has them and Sarge has not.

Re:Well ...

[Cro Magnon]

The difference is, Microsoft HAS made several releases since 1998. Debian hasn't. And most businesses don't want to run beta software, even if Debian's betas ARE more reliable than Windows releases.

Re:Well ...

[digidave]

The first mistake is to think that Debian has a release cycle or that it even needs one.

Debian stable has all the updated security patches. Debian unstable and testing are upgraded with new software versions constantly. You never need to download a new ISO and install a new version of Debian because the version you have is kept up to date. Distro version numbers are entirely useless for Debian. You just install what you want to install and upgrade what you want to upgrade and *that's it*.

Debian stable isn't old, it's VERY VERY stable, just like the name says. If Debian is guilty of anything it's that they picked a bad name for their unstable repository. If they renamed it 'Debian new' nobody would be complaining, but this attitude that a RedHat or Mandrake release is somehow more stable than Debian unstable makes everyone think that you should not run Debian unstable on production boxes.

Most businesses could probably understand the advantage of Debian's non-cycle release cycle if somebody explained it to them. They've all been through upgrades from Win NT or 98 to 2000 to XP and they know it's a huge, expensive, pain in the ass. They know they're still running NT 4 servers because upgrading is too painful. IMO, business is *begging* for a Debian-like release cycle for both servers and desktops so they can finally get out of upgrade hell.

But nobody's ever explained it to them that it can work that way and MS sure isn't going to offer it any time soon.

Re:Well ...

[manual_overide]

Are you trying to imply that Windows 98 is stable?!!

Go sell your crazy talk somewhere else. We're all stocked up here.

Re:Well ...

[cortana]

Sigh

Will you people ever learn?

Stable means that the release doesn't change around under your feet without warning. Stable recieves security fixes only. You can install Stable, and it will work for years and years. It is a stable platform that you can use to develop software, deploy accross a network, etc.

Unstable means that the packages *do* change around constantly. Unstable is where the Debian Developers upload packages that should be ready for a release. It is in a constant state of flux.

Testing is the next release of Debian. If a package has existed in Unstable for ten days, and no one has filed a release critical bug against it, it is moved into Testing.

The current codename for Testing is Sarge. Once the security and testing-proposed-updates autobuilders are brought online, and the RC bug count (see http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/) hits zero (either through bug fixes or package removals), Sarge will be declared Stable, Testing will be renamed Etch and everyone will breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Re:Well ...

[lanc]

Its behind on kernel releases, I need 2.6.11 to support my USB drive

roll your own. make-kpkg is your friend.

Re:Well ...

[mindstrm]

When I pushed this organization onto Debian (from redhat), STABLE had current, up to date packages on it. Not bleeding edge, but current. If it could somehow magically be "stable" and have current packages on it 3 years ago, don't you think it's logical that it could do the same today?

Do you honestly think STABLE is supposed to have 3 year old packages in it? This is the oldest, most out of date STABLE we've ever had.

It's not old because "that's how you keep it stable"

It's old because of an organizational inability to get testing stable... due to the number of platforms supported, the bulk of software involved, etc.

STABLE in the Debian sense doesn't mean "it won't crash".. it means the package dependencies are stable; that you won't find missing packages. and that's ALL it means.

This is the internet age.. we need up to date software.

I can tell you, running any of our corporate servers on debian now necessitates us using packages form testing and even from unstable, or we build them from source. And if we have to do that, we've lost the benefit we had of using debian in the first place.

I'm seriously contemplating just switching to FreeBSD for this reason, at least it's consistant.

Re:Well ...

[FauxPasIII]

> STABLE in the Debian sense doesn't mean "it won't crash".. it means the package dependencies
> are stable; that you won't find missing packages. and that's ALL it means.

Actually, that's what testing means. Stable means they'll never bump to a new version if it
breaks backwards-compatibility.

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-sys tem.en.html#s-dists

Re:Well ...

[samjam]

Oh, sure, I will.

I built my 2.6.11 debian kernels from source, but it was from deb-src, I know I could give myself a pristine kernel but I just have to check over what was in all the ubuntu kernel patches and see if any of my ubuntu packages are going to depend on any of that.

Such is life when one departs from the packagers path, I just hoped ubuntu was going to save me this grief.

Sam

Re:Well ...

[noahm]

I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal. Or run mostly stable, and just upgrade select items to testing, and other select items to unstable. Hell, if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, CVS and compile and help with testing. I couldn't imagine anyone running debian stable unless it was critical to be *rock-solid* stable. Which means heavy load servers, in my mind.

Sure, that works just fine if you have only about 1 or 2 machines and only a couple of users. But not everybody is in that position! I run a large enterprise with hundreds of Debian workstations and servers. It's not so simple to just "run testing or unstable". I need a machine installed today to behave the same as a machine installed yesterday. That makes testing/unstable very difficult for me to use.

I can't believe how freqently I hear people spouting the "just run unstable" bit. It's just not that simple.

noah

Re:Well ...

[John Hasler]

> If they want money...

Debian is not short of money, nor does the lack of it have anything to do with the delayed release. The "flat broke" line was invented by the doofus who posted the article.

Re:Well ...

[Daniel]

The difference is, Microsoft HAS made several releases since 1998. Debian hasn't.

Actually, Debian has made several releases since 1998. Hamm was released in 1998, slink in 1999, potato in 2000, and woody in 2002.

Daniel

Re:Well ...

[Daniel]

If they want money, make a damn release, or die. It's really THAT simple.

While everyone else is yammering about the release schedule, I thought I should point out (shouting into the void though it may be) that nothing in Branden's missive said Debian needs money. While I don't have access to a detailed history of the Project's finances, I would bet we have about as much money as we ever have had.

Debian is just not a cash-intensive operation, because most requirements are filled either by volunteer work or in-kind donations (i.e., donations of hardware and bandwidth).

Daniel

Re:Well ...

[samjam]

ubunto still doesn't have firefox 1.03

This has been mentioned on support forums.

Sam

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian stable isn't old, it's VERY VERY stable, just like the name says. If Debian is guilty of anything it's that they picked a bad name for their unstable repository. If they renamed it 'Debian new' nobody would be complaining

Name ideas:

stable: static
testing: freezing?
unstable: dynamic

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

$40,000 is about what Debian has always had in the bank (since the .com boom anyway. It had and needed essentially nothing before that.)

That said, we did collect donations along with the CD's we distributed at a local fair, and 80% of that went to Debian (the other 20% covered the blanks).

Re:Well ...

[rxchurch]

I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal.
This makes it pretty clear you have never run production systems.
The last time I ran a .deb from unstable, it broke my webserver and my boss wasn't very happy. Linux has had an upstream battle to win any corporate acceptance. My CIO was STILL questioning our choice to use RedHat in production LAST WEEK.
If Debian want's to remain a relevant distro, they need up to date packages in STABLE. If Debain would like to remain on a scarce few computers (with more people dropping off all the time), they are doing a great job.
Untested and unstable software packages are just that. Untested and unstable.
And unsuitable for any kind of production work.

Re:Well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I run 340 vpn sites on debian stable with our own deb for openvpn. rest is stable base with ssh. works great. I sleep well. all the sites are on dell gx1 pII266/32MB we payed $50 apiece for. critical sites have a spare on hand (hdds and fans, you know...) company likes the savings.

Save the money!

[ded_si_luap]

They should save it up. At 2% interest, they'll double their money by the next release.

Re:Save the money!

[whiteranger99x]

Good investment advice! To think if this was GNU Hurd at 2%, they'd make 100x the money by the first release!

Re:Save the money!

[Ziviyr]

35 years?

No, 20 years would be a better guess for next release...

Truth be told...

[Nimrangul]

I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise.

I think it would be better if they set their developers to specific tasks for the betterment of their distrobution with that money than simply hold on to it and wait for that eventual rainy day though.

Re:Truth be told...

[fishbowl]

"I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise."

It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000 number without understanding it in terms of their expenses. Is Debian a US corporation? A LLC? A NPO? What does $40,000 represent?

I'm sure you could find all kinds of businesses that don't keep $40,000 in a cash fund.

Re:Truth be told...

[Nimrangul]

Debian is an open source project run freely by an elected leader and it's developers, it is copyrighted by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (which once held GNOME's hand in the same manner).

SPI takes in the money and helps give it's projects as much financial support as possible.

Basically, Debian made a little non-profit years back to handle it's money and that's what SPI does.

So it's an open source project funded by donations funneled through a non-profit organisation they founded. They are no company of any kind, it's SPI that does the money-work.

Re:Truth be told...

[John Hasler]

> It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000
> number without understanding it in terms of their
> expenses.

Debian's expenses are perhaps a few thousand per year for travel and miscellaneous and a few thousand more for hardware. Most hardware is donated, but sometimes it is necessary to buy a new disk for a crashed server or something to get it back up quickly.

Re:Truth be told...

[fishbowl]

"Debian's expenses are perhaps a few thousand per year for travel and miscellaneous and a few thousand more for hardware."

You have their books open on your desk, and I don't, so I'll just take your word for it.

try taking accounting lessons from enron..

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian will be the richest software development project in the world!

-fooburger

Debian can't be broke

[Anonymous Coward]

The people own it, it will never die. ;)

Debian>all

Re:Debian can't be broke

[Anonymous Coward]

People use gentoo nowadays.

Re:Debian can't be broke

[Anonymous Coward]

The people own it, it will never die. ;)

fucking commie.

Why the need for money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Money doesn't need to be involed in a Linux world!

Free software + Free OS = Free Labor!

Just the way Linux people love it...FREE!!

Re:Why the need for money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning, typical Open Source misunderstanding detected !

About donating to Debian

[Nanoda]

As I use Debian at home and at work, I seem to recall trying to donate to them a while back.

The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org are this one listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation

$40K?!

[Emperor Tiberius]

What does the project need $40K for? I understand there are bandwidth and server costs, but it is a volunteer project.

After all, Red Hat only made $210K last quarter of '03...and they sell a product! Is there any list of Debian's financials available? I assume since it's mostly open-ended it should be on the site somewhere. Although I will confess, I havenn't done my research yet.

Re:$40K?!

[Keamos]

$210K profit. They made $4.1mil.

Re:$40K?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and...?
Profit = Revenue - Expenses

So donations to a project that doesn't have expenses ~= Profit.

Re:$40K?!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Red Hat made a whole lot more than $4.1 million. Check the article which the parent linked to a little more closely. They made $4.1 million profit in the 3rd quarter of fiscal 2004 ($33.1 million in revenue), as compared to $214K profit in the 3rd quarter of fiscal 2003.

However, note that the date on the article is December 18, 2003, which is pretty out of date. More recent numbers are considerably higher.

Sensationalistic article

[Overfiend]

The submitter seems to be a little breathless.

Here are a few facts:

1) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), has held roughly the same amount of money (USD 40,000) in trust for Debian since as far back as the middle of the year 2001 (when I became SPI Treasurer and began receiving the monthly and quarterly statements from the financial institutions where that money is kept). It is therefore difficult to conclude any more of a cash crisis for Debian now than there was four years ago.

2) SPI is not the only organization that holds assets in trust for Debian. As noted in my first DPL report (linked from the /. article body), I am currently surveying the developers to establish the details of what other organizations are holding monies for the Project. My report triggered a flurry of replies within hours. There are assets in Brazil, the U.K., Germany, Italy, and France, at least. Generally speaking, because it's a good idea and because regulations typically make it difficult for large amounts of currency to leave a country, Debian keeps its money close to where it's needed. Debian is a global organization; we have hardware, developers, and conferences all over the world.

3) People should read the internetnews.com article, also linked from the /. article body. But why don't I just go ahead and quote from the IRC interview, which I still have in scrollback:

12:43 INTERVIEWER: In your Debian Project Leader report for 2005-04-24, you provide status on the state of Debian's assets. On the surface it doesn't look like debian has "much" in the way of cash assets now - is that a problem for Debian? If so, how will you try and "fix" the problem?

12:44 ME: can you clarify the question? "much" relative to what? :)

12:45 INTERVIEWER: by "much" i'm refering to the fact that commercial distros (Red Hat etc) have xx millions in the bank - so in comparison it doesn't look (to a layperson) like Debian has "much" in terms of cash assets

12:45 INTERVIEWER: does that help?

12:45 ME: ah, compared to a commercial interest.

12:45 ME: yes, it does help.

12:47 ME: Because Debian is a non-commercial, not-for-profit entity which derives most of its value from the donated labor of hundreds of individuals, I think it stands to reason that our books wouldn't look like those of a publicly-traded, incorporated body which has labor and capital expenditures.

12:48 ME: I think there are several reasons Debian doesn't have much in the way of cash assets relative to a for-profit Free Software company, though.

12:49 ME: 1) Debian has no source revenue apart from fund-raising, which to date has been regularly undertaken at trade shows, to those who happen to pass by our booth.

12:49 ME: s/source/& of/

12:50 ME: 2) Debian tends to spend its cash assets, at least in the United States, approximately as fast as they come in.

12:51 ME: 3) There have been conflicting ideas among Debian developers in the past over whether Debian *should* attempt to accumulate a war chest of cash reserves.

12:51 ME: An argument in favor of that is that we should do so in the event we, or one of our developers, is sued for doing something we consider legitimate, like offering freely-modifiable software gratis to the world.

12:51 ME: s/is sued/are sued/

[the interviewer moved on, but we came back to this subject at the end of the interview]

13:03 ME: okay. Reasons *not* to build up a war chest...

13:04 ME: Two arguments against building up a "war chest" are 1) actually having a large quanitity of liquid assets is felt to make us a more inviting target for lawsuits, because there is the possibility of damages on top of injunctions;

13:05 ME: 2) People who donate us money, by and large, seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near term, not towards establishing an endowment.

13:05 ME: In my years on the SPI Board and as

Re:Sensationalistic article

[whoisshe]

stupid question: is there any security risk associated with the fact that debian's assets (presumably including the build machines) are scattered everywhere? i'm sure it's a non-issue, but i use debian binaries and have idly wondered about it, but never really asked...

Re:Sensationalistic article

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I speak for everyone when I say, cheers for that, very informative.

And in relation to deciding for ourselves, you have a good point about slashdot. But this fits into a wider pattern of editorial behaviour that was always present, but has amped up recently, which is to post "troll" articles which will cause much furore in the linux community.

Yes, Slashdot has always had such things. But I believe there is a deliberate editorial policy now to post such things. In addition, I think there are submitters who know this. In addition I think there are journalists on tech news sites who know they can troll linux with a "omg not ready for the desktop" or somesuch and likely get linked to and have a storm of click-throughs (from which they derive their money remember).

So tech journalists, submitters and editors all have a vested interest in these "troll" articles to the detriment of well formed and intelligent debate. It's getting almost as bad as GNAA and other troll groups whose stated goals are to cause controversy and not add any "signal" (as in signal to noise) to the slashdot. So basically the editors are doing the trolls jobs for them (or is it the other way around?).

It's why I block slashdot ads, and why I will never subscribe. I encourage others to do the same.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Man, what a telling commentary about the decline of slashdot when the article's subject shows up posts, yet only three people notice.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[dalutong]

what does "in scrollback" mean?

thanks.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he simply means that his IRC client was still open, and the window where the IRC interview was held was still open, and the IRC client window had the whole interview buffered. He was able to scroll the window back to reveal the whole conversation, and then copy-and-paste the relevant bits.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[k8to]

Yes, that is the meaning of that term in IRC parlance. Typically people keep hundreds to thousands of lines in memory per window, often reaching back several days.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[dalutong]

ah. thanks.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[Bob Uhl]

The advantage of investing is that it provides a long-term source of funding. A few large gifts could endow developer seats for eternity, which is surely a Good Thing...

Re:Sensationalistic article

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent suggestion.

Firefox:
Right click on banner.
Block Images from ...

Do what you can to improve slashdot. Take the money away.

Re:Sensationalistic article

[Daniel]

I don't know about security, but I can think of some good reasons to spread Debian machines and other assets around.

Daniel

Debian's appeal

[Anonymous Coward]

With new distros like Centos 4 (free RHEL 4 clone), Debian is getting less attractive as the server of choice. And this is someone who hated RHEL 3.

I made the mistake of installing Sarge thinking that it was only a couple months away from release--that was last year...and I have to pin Testing with Unstable branch just to get all the security updates in a timely fashion--it defeats the purpose using Debian as a server...

Yea, I could've installed Stable, but why would I want to install a 2+ year old distro on a brand new server when a new stable was 'any day now'?

Re:Debian's appeal

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian stable is not bad.

In my opinion I prefer Debian for systems that I have to support myself, and Redhat for systems that need third party support for whatever reasons.

The nice thing about Debian is that you generally know that everything 'just works' by default. There is a lot of setup, but it's pretty rare that you have to monkey around with stuff like applying patches and recompiling software or writing your own init scripts.

And if you do run into problems then it's not long before you get a update. And even if a update breaks something then you usually have quite a few versions of the same package to choose from so you can just keep the last known 'good' one.

The down side is that you have to know what your doing. There is no slick GUI stuff to help you out or nice default settings for this type or that type of server. But it's worth it when you get it working.

This is a setup that I've been playing around with to learn how to do stuff. A sort of 'tour-de-force' of free software to push myself a bit.

Debian 'Sid' experimental server:
Kernel 2.6.8, default Debian kernel.
3 disks, 2 on a SATA to PCI adapter, 1 on the onboard PATA controller. They are setup in a RAID 5 array (Linux software RAID) for a total of 223.57 gigabytes of disk storage space.

On that I have a single LVM VG on that RAID 5 array with several LV's.

With that I created my own 'local' top-level-domain with bind.. which I use to build a network domain consisting of a Kerberos realm working in conjunction with OpenLDAP (TLS encrypted via OpenSSL and commincating to Kerberos via Cyrus SASL using the GSSAPI framework) for network authentication and user/resources management.(Libnss_ldap provides for universal UID, GUID mapping and other type things.)

With that I can use secure authentication with kerberos and acheive the Single Sign On solution so that my users can access all the network services by logging in and obtaining tickets.. OpenAFS distributed network filing system for home folders provided via autofs, password-less OpenSSH for secure file transfer thru scp and sftp and secure remote access via ssh, Email (haven't decided that yet), and I am going to see about using CUPS for remote printers and SANED for remote scanners.

Also with the OpenAFS-based home directories this will create the 'roaming profile' effect so that end users will have identical enviroments and GUI setup irregardless of what paticular machine they happen to be using at the moment.

Well, just keep in mind that it's experimental for __me__. So I don't mind using SID.

Otherwise the OpenAFS, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, et al are VERY mature and stable solutions and fairly cross-platform. So it should work fine with my OS X laptop and any other OS that I'd happen to play around with... Solaris maybe, or many different Linux and *BSD variants.

Also in addition to SAMBA I should be able to integrate Windows nicely into it with some work. Although OpenAFS should work with Windows, I just don't know how well.

Keep in mind that this is free software-based domain stuff. VERY flexible.

Other commercial setups are Active Directory (easy compared to setting up this mess, but it's very limited in scope), Novell's eDirectory stuff (NDS). As well as IBM, Sun, and that Netscape stuff that Redhat bought a while back.

Re:Debian's appeal

[bankman]

With new distros like Centos 4 (free RHEL 4 clone), Debian is getting less attractive as the server of choice. And this is someone who hated RHEL 3.

I made the mistake of installing Sarge thinking that it was only a couple months away from release--that was last year...and I have to pin Testing with Unstable branch just to get all the security updates in a timely fashion--it defeats the purpose using Debian as a server...

Man, what's your problem? You are preferring over unsupported distro of another. Debian Sarge is reliable and secure for most purposes and has been for a while. I have not seen a show stopping bug in ages. It has been (almost I have to admit) feature frozen for quite some time now and everything that's coming in are either security or bug fixes. Compare that to Centos (or Whitebox or Tao or whatever the RHEL clone of the day is), which is basically a rebuild of RHEL sources. Fixes are lagging behind the official distro.

Pinning Sarge and Unstable on a server to get security updates, now where did you get this idea from?

Besides, you might be interested in comparing this with this.

No wonder you are posting AC ;-)

Re:Debian's appeal

[Dionysus]

It has been (almost I have to admit) feature frozen for quite some time now and everything that's coming in are either security or bug fixes.

I run Sarge on my mailserver. Recently (probably a couple of months ago, after Christmas, before April), bogofilter changed its database format when I upgraded, which broke bogofilter. If Sarge had been stable, this wouldn't happen.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Fjornir]

But... Why? I mean... Why? I mean nine out of ten people who are going to want to use Linux on anything except the mainline architectures are going to be running Gentoo anyways d/t the complete and total ease of installing it anywhere Linux boots...

Broke?

[mjg59]

Debian's income is larger than its outgoings. Money is good to have - it means that we can deal with hardware failures, get more people to conferences, and pay the fees for some industry representation bodies, but we don't need vast amounts of it. We've currently got about as much in reserve as we could possibly want.

Endowment?

[cgenman]

I can only imagine the great things endowed chairs for software development in the public interest could do. Think of it like this. For a million dollars one could probably update Open Office pretty well, paying 10 software developers for a year to gut the old codebase and update it to something less bloated. Or you could create two endowed chairs, paying two software developers to create or work on software in the public interest for life. And once they die, you pay the next pair for life. And the next.

10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.

Speaking of which, does anyone have a donation link?

Re:Endowment?

[Paradise Pete]

10 software developers for a year...Or you could create two endowed chairs

Only if you know where you can earn a steady 20% interest (let alone after taxes and adjusting for inflation.)

Re:Endowment?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I wonder if there is a "time value of money" equation for the rate of evolution of technology. You have to innovate at least as fast as the "market rate" in order to stay current. If you could burn through a lot of cash (and still remain somewhat konstant (there are communication costs as the number of people in a project increases) in terms of value recieved) you would jump a generation or two ahead of the competition. Might this not be worth considering? What good would be getting DOS really really right, if it came in 2038? The perfect Win3.1 replacement in 2076?

I'm not saying it is needed, now. Just you prompted the thought, and I've never seen "time value of tech dev acceleration" equations...

Re:Endowment?

[KingJoshi]

The idea of an endowment has some appeal. But your own scenario misses a key point.

Investment in the short term would result in both preservation and extension of its base, which is likely to bring more funds (assuming 10 developers would improve the release date for Sarge, over 2 developers).

At the rate we're going, Sarge will take forever and people will start to abandon the project and new developers will go to Centos and Ubuntu. But, IMHO, we need a project/organization like Debian and we really need Sarge.

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not too hard if you're well connected enough. Quite a few Venture Funds do that well or much better.

The VC funds listed there (scroll down to pages 3,4) almost all have rates of return well over 20%.

From that chart, even conservative private equity funds like ones from Madison Dearborn and Thomas Lee have done returned over 20% since 1995!

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

What good would be getting DOS really really right, if it came in 2038?

Well, it could be a useful replacement for all those old UNIX systems that are due to fail around then...

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. The Debian project would be very well served by taking the long view financially. They should certainly be investing some small portion of their donations with the goal of creating a self-sustaining source of funding - this is the kind of thing that makes for an organization with real staying power. But then again, will possession of a big wad of cash and assets inevitably attract to the leadership roles, people who are more interested in the wad of cash than in the project?

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying 10 developers for a year, would be the same as paying 2 developers at the same rate for only 5 years. Where are you getting 100?!

Re:Endowment?

[Ryan Amos]

Debian is largely irrelevant now anyway; which is exactly why organizations like this should not really plan for the long term. Open source projects are notorious for forking, and open source users are fickle. Debian was the rock star of the Linux world 5 years ago, but now they seem like a shadow of their former self and on the decline in the face of newer distributions like Ubuntu. I don't know anyone who uses vanilla Debian anymore; the package system is cumbersome if adding packages from anyone but Debian and their software is so old that I wouldn't even bother.

In other words, I guess it's ok to plan for the long term, but realize that in this industry, "long term" is about 5 years. Setting up an endowment might be a bit premature.

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it could be a useful replacement for all those old UNIX systems that are due to fail around then [2038]...

Hee-hee.
I'm running Slackware 3.2 (from 1997) on one of my machines, and have no intention of upgrading any time soon, so it's entirely possible that some people (like me) could experience the UNIX Y2.038K date problem, if our hardware hokds out until then.
It's only 33 years away, and I have hardware and software that's over 20 years old (an Amiga) that I still use occasionally, so it's not too far-fetched.

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just invest it in oil.

Granted, oil is not cheap per se -- but their costs are subsudized by the US government: free tax breaks and free tanker escort services. You can EASILY profit 20% and let the taxpayer pay the other expenses.

Re:Endowment?

[HumanTorch]

10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects

Except the reality is that Debian has lost momentum. Those 10 developers for a year may be able to put it back in a leadership position, thereby increasing donations.

Re:Endowment?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.

I don't see how these two things are the same. With $1,000,000, 10 developers for a year gives $100,000 salary per person. 2 developers for life (40-year career) gives $12,500.

Re:Endowment?

[AmigaBen]

Call me off-topic, but for the sake of accuracy, I'd like to point out that you don't have an Amiga over 20 years old... unless you have a pre-release model. And I additionally doubt that you actually -use- an Amiga 1000.

First Amiga was released June (or July?) 23, 1985. So, you have a couple months to go before your statement could be true.. with the possible pre-release exception above.

Re:Endowment?

[Paradise Pete]

Well, not too hard if you're well connected enough.

Yes it is. It's really, really difficult.

Quite a few Venture Funds do that well or much better.

Only if you ignore the word "steady." If you have enough funds in operation, just by chance some will do very well for a while. And if you really have enough, just by chance one or two will do very well for a long time. But you can't predict which ones. If you can reliably produce 20%+ returns year after year, you will soon have more money than you can ever possibly spend.

Re:Endowment?

[xenocide2]

You say that Debian is irrelevant, but when you propose that Ubuntu is eating their lunch as such, you're really understating the releveance Debian plays within Ubuntu. Most of the developers are DD's. But there's enough of them just lying around, and there doesn't seem to be an expiration on membership. But there is an established relationship, and its largely parasitic. Every six months, Ubuntu takes the Debian sid tree and forks it into the new Ubuntu stable branch. While there were claims that Ubuntu would be better about contributing back to Debian, the feedback loop has been minimal, with many Debian package maintainers just discovering by accident that ubuntu has forked their package and made the .diffs available on some page somewhere. Basically, nobody's going to go the extra mile to make them actually contribute back and forth. If Debian is broken and not viable in the long term, then Ubuntu will quickly be in trouble.

Until last year when my box imploded, I was using vanilla debian sid. Today I use Ubuntu, because they focus on my particular usage desires. I still follow the Debian team, but that's pretty easy because they mostly go nowhere. Gnome 2.10 has just been placed in experimental (the existance of experimental is another post on another day itself). But there's a price to pay for that experimenalness. I've heard criticism that Ubuntu adopted the 2.6.10 kernel too quickly, and I'm witnessing some oddities involving rebooting. Its not that big of a deal to me, but that's mostly because I don't have a trackpad or anything like that.

That said, I don't think an endowment is really what Debian needs, and fourty thousand isn't exactly halfway there either. The only sugggestion on keeping cash on hand has been as a Just In Case We're Sued fund. I think Debian should focus on producing something of value, that should the group find itself under legal scrutiny, they'll also find many people coming to their aid. Hopefully, Robinson will establish a periodic release philosophy within Debian to undo their funk and let future leaders focus on a new topic of improvement instead of the same old We Need To Release.

Re:Endowment?

[rbrito]

Debian is largely irrelevant now anyway;

Ok, you are probably a troll and I should not be replying to you, but I can't really stand such misguided words being moderated highly.

First of all, you seem to regard Ubuntu like the successor of Debian. Well, let me tell you something: Ubuntu bases their releases on a mix of packages, including Debian's sid. I guess that the Ubuntu people know better about their design decisions than what you seem to show in front of many here.

which is exactly why organizations like this should not really plan for the long term. Open source projects are notorious for forking, and open source users are fickle. Debian was the rock star of the Linux world 5 years ago, but now they seem like a shadow of their former self and on the decline in the face of newer distributions like Ubuntu.

Well, so many points here to comment. First of all is being a "rock star" something good, that everybody should strive to be? I think not. Every operating system and every distribution of such operating systems has a niche and, as long as there are users interested in it, it serves a purpose.

Would you tell me that the BSD projects are worthless, just because they are not that popular as Linux? And what about other Linux distributions that aren't as well spread as, say, RedHat/Fedora? Are they worthless?

I can tell you that the work that Debian does regarding porting the software (and, similarly, other BSD projects like NetBSD) is quite welcome and has already been the source of bug discoveries, because not everybody has a 32 bit system, not everybody has a little-endian system, not all platforms have signed chars etc. It seems that you are either naïve or talking without knowing the subject at hand (well, that's supposed to be the case for a troll).

I don't know anyone who uses vanilla Debian anymore;

Just before you don't see something that means that it doesn't exist? Don't forget to tell that to your doctor the next time you have an infection. And speaking of vanilla Debian, yes, I use it on all my systems. I'm not that amazed by such high number of derivative distributions, because I don't have computers with much horsepower (unfortunately, the fastest computer to which I have access is a Duron 600MHz, with 256MB of RAM -- I am not in the U.S. (I live in Brazil) and it seems that people have gotten bad habits of programming by writing software with many and many layers of abstractions, to the point where we need a supercomputer (by the standards of 10 years ago) to produce the same texts that we once did.

I always try to write software in a resource economical way and that's what I teach my students to do (of course, without premature optimization -- I teach algorithms).

BTW, I have an OldWorld PowerMac 9500/180MP that I inherited from my uncle and it has 64MB of RAM. I recently received as a gift a G3 upgrade card and it is now back in a productive order (well, taking into consideration that its HD is slow and that it has limited memory).

But if it were not for, say, Debian, I would not be able to use this computer with Linux, because very few distributions support OldWorld macs. And I think that I can help debugging and developing software so that the world is a better place. And, actually, testing your software on many platforms is a good way to see if your programs are indeed well-written.

Oh, BTW, I would love to receive RAM for this mac that I mentioned, if you are going to throw away the memory. I would put it to some good use and teach some friends to use Linux (and, honestly, once you install a distribution, almost everything seems similar, even across many platforms -- so, I don't really understand the so hot comments about using one or another distribution, because it is "better"

the package system is cumbersome if adding packages from anyone but Debian and their software is s

Endowment

[Fussen]

Lands. Wet Lands. Debian style. Pengiuns everywhere.

40k - (cost of releasing) = ?

[LodCrappo]

I love Debian.. I have used it for a long long time. I enjoy the environment, the stability, and the package manager you can trust not to screw up your machine even when you tell it to do fairly stupid things. All in all it's a system does make sense and does follow convetion enough of the time to keep me productive and having fun.

Used to be, when the people I knew who knew what they were talking about talked about linux, they probably were talking about Debian GNU/Linux.

Things are changing. More and more smart folks I know are frustrated. Most Open source projects are using a "release early and release often" mentality that is a stark contrast to Debian's recent "don't release at all" policy.

Yes, there is always unstable for those that want the latest(ish) versions of things. That's really not the point, as I see it. People are frustrated with the lack of movement, the apparent lack of progress towards getting any new features into stable, even if they arentt the very latest. I think at some point, many people just like to feel like their system is getting new software even if they don't use any new features at all.

Maybe the negative stuff I read on /. and here tossed around between friends is not accurate. Things might not really be as stagnate as they seem from a common user's prespective. But that Debian has gone from a Good Thing to a bit of a joke amongst the sys admins I respect makes me concerned about it's future.

There are some distro's out there that are attempting to fill the void that debian has created, and some are starting to do a good job of it. A world where a debian based distro replaces a bulk of the debian based users is not hard to imagine right now. What happens to debian then? And what happens to a debian based distro when debian doesn't have users?

It could work out great for almost everyone except the actual debian project. i think everyone in a position of influence there needs to compare the costs of addressing the current perception one way or another to the cost of bascially becoming irrelevant.

I hope I am still enjoying doing my work with debian systems many years from now, but I am starting to wonder if I won't be working on some (probably debian based) alternative instead.

well thats my rant, please forgive any spelling mistakes or generally stupid things I might have said. I'm not one of the smart ones.

Re:40k - (cost of releasing) = ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please explain what exactly the issue is about having 'releases'?

When I install debian I grab a netinst cd and update to sid as soon as possible, and then update at least weekly, often daily. My software is quite up to date without being ridiculously bleeding-edge and 99.9% of the time everything works as it should.

I've never understood the importance of having a new official release; Debian gets the job done whether or not it has a new version number or name.

Re:40k - (cost of releasing) = ?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'll explain. Developing software is not cheap -- either in money or donated time.

One of the things you can do to make it significantly cheaper is to limit platform variability. That means picking a very specific platform and coding just for that. The easiest way for that to happen is for your OS Vendor to "release" a bunch of mostly stable something that you can target easily.

I don't know what's going with Debian, but it wouldn't suprise me if they were seeing a "waterfall" effect, where the platform (Kernel, Glibc, GCC, Apache, etc) keeps moving and they never finish stabilizing all software before the platform shifts again, breaking stuff again and starting the process over again.

Re:40k - (cost of releasing) = ?

[Vo0k]

Except you're running the UNSTABLE release.
What if I wanted STABLE? That's important for many, but Woody contains so ancient versions of packages that it's mostly useless. Sid works 99.9% of the time because it contains software with newly fixed bugs. Woody survives 90% cases maybe - old bugs still present, new hardware, new protocols, new requirements of the real world just make it obsolete.
We don't need another "unstable" release. But what about finally releasing an up-to-date STABLE one where reliablity counts but the system can use -some- modern technology, and not only what has been obsoleted by much more reliable versions ages ago?

Re:40k - (cost of releasing) = ?

[hawk]

a stark contrast to Debian's recent "don't release at all" policy.

Mickey Mouse/Bob Cratched: "P-p-please, Mr. Scrooge? M-might I have a piece of c-c-coal to warm my hands?"

Scrooge McDuck/Scrooge: "I gave you a piece of coal last week! Get back to work."

hawk, wondering if the debian he installed on his 486 laptop in 1998 or so is still the current release (but not curious enough to rush home and fix the power supply)

how bout Oh Please!!

[dbcad7]

Get your Sarge bittorrent here.. http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/weekly/torrents

There you go, your done, the waitings over..

Don't you fell better now ? .. Seriously, what's the deal with this Sarge release hysteria ? It's out there, I use it, it works, it seems pretty stable to me (in my case more than Ubuntu warty was)

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[zokahn]

Ohhh brother (sigh)

I don't plan on using this stuff for hobby pet projects, I want to make money of it (so i can eat and donate) and use it in a commercial enviroment. Do I tell my manager: "ohh but it it's almost stable, we don't need to wait..." i'm not gonna! I need it to be officialy released before I stick my head out for Debian!

I love debian dearly especially as a server OS. I love sarge, i've been using it on my private projects but would love to see it released soon.

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[dbcad7]

I don't see how an "official" release is going to help you in convincing your manager of anything. Debian is not like buying Redhat with "support".

Unles you are the one providing the support, perhaps you would be better off looking at something like Xandros for your commercial environment. That way you get your Debian, and someone to phone.

Even after Sarge is officialy declared "released" there are sure to be updates and bug fixes, just as there are today with woody. The fact that they call it "testing" is misleading, it's really very stable.

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Stable is a relative term. It isn't just "stable" vs. "testing", really. It is only valid relative to any one given distribution.

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[zokahn]

To bad you don't see it. I need to convince people, make a case for a product before it is used to support the business. I agree that this version of Sarge is stable, technically more advanced than woody, especially if you want to use a 2.6 kernel with LVM suppport right at install.

For me a large userbase, losts of people using a product is more convincing than a lesser used product with expensive support. And a official release will result in more users. (Don't dump the "don't follow the crowd" flame on me) A large userbase means that known problems are likely to be solved by others and my own efforts to solve problems will help more others.

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Redhat Enterprise Linux. Debian is a poor choice for a production environment.

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[cortana]

It's not stable at all. New packages continue to flow in nightly, and there is no security support!

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well argumented.

But I can equal you:

Debian is a good choice for a production environment.

See?

Re:how bout Oh Please!!

[m50d]

There's one big difference: security fixes are backported to stable. They're not backported to testing. (They're not backported to unstable either, but that normally gets the updated version from upstream soon enough). So testing systems can have holes for significant period.

Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit

[Anonymous Coward]

double-you tee eff, mate? The Debian Project Leader is supreme commander of everything Debian, he doesn't *need* to use self-aggrandizing acronyms. :P

Please go troll somewhere else.

$40,000 in the bank might be just right

[EnormousTooth]

What happens if donations start to dip for a while? Debian's pretty much screwed in that case unless they have some money in the bank.

Re:Endowment? -- donation link info

[OA]

See following pages for donation info for Debian:

http://www.debian.org/donations

This tells us basically to go to:

http://www.spi-inc.org/donations

Here you find link to donate money. Please note you should designate your money to "Debian" to ensure it is used only for Debian. Otherwise, money will be spread over all the projects supported by SPI, I think.

Osamu

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeeeaaahh...

Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit

[Anonymous Coward]

My sympathy. I'd also be scared if anyone close to me 'acronymized' their tit.

Branden Robinson

[Dink Paisy]

Branden Robinson led the Debian X strike force that patched and packaged XFree86 for Debian. During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended. At the time I continued using Debian, and just built my own copy of X for a while, but I would say that his attitude is one of the significant reasons I no longer use Debian.

Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness. I don't know him personally, so I'm not the most qualified judge, but I do not consider his election a good thing for Debian. Leaders should ideally be good at communicating, and less good at ignoring and insulting people, and what I've seen of him reflects those negative traits more than the positive one.

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not surprised you mentioned the above. I used to use Debian in the old days, but then Branden got in there and started screwing up X. I tried to be reasonable and use the system of filing bug reports and such at that time. After awhile I got tired of his personality. Some people have no problems with his type of personality, but fortunately you can alway move to another distribution or roll your own. I refused to use his X. It might have been good, but there were others good enough without dealing with him.

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

Branden Robinson led the Debian X strike force that patched and packaged XFree86 for Debian. During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!"

I won't attempt to justify having such a graphic on the official X Strike Force page; that was rather over-the-top. However, in that particular case, it was in response to being asked *many times per day* when the next release of X would be packaged for Debian. Furthermore, that graphic has been removed, and Branden has often mentioned that is making a conscious effort to refrain from flaming even in the most trying situations. He also developed a number of "stock answer" files, for ease of dealing with standard issues like duplicate bugs, insufficient information ("X is broken"), and requests for when the next version will be available.

Re:Branden Robinson

[Heretik]

I'll take a good honest, humorous "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" over canned corporate PR bullshit any day.

Re:Branden Robinson

[poofyhairguy82]

During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended.

Its still there I think. I use it as my desktop. Its funny dammit!

Re:Branden Robinson

[Bluehorn]

Being a Debian developer myself I can understand why one would put such a comment online. Back when I started working on Debian it meant to hack on software and make it work - originally mostly for myself.

But if you try to maintain a core package of the distribution things change. You don't spend most of your time on package development anymore but on fighting the flood of bug reports and inquiries.

And it is quite frustrating rolling out a new package revision with important fixes and getting a bug report with severity: grave which just tells you the package is shit because of some small oversight. Sometimes I'd really like to jump into the face of those special reporters.

This shows in an unfriendly tone of some of my emails (not sure if this is sensed by a native speaker :)) but I try not to flame. Branden used to write flame baits here and then but most of the time he had a point and was defending his position.

From what I can tell he got much more calm for some time now (which also reflects in the fact that he was only elected now and not years ago). And I think he will make a good leader since he is that kind of guy who can make changes even with opposition. You can't always suit everybody.

If RMS was needed to start the GNU project then Branden Robinson might be the person who is needed to fix Debian's problems. Good luck in that!!

Re:Branden Robinson

[nametaken]

He also developed a number of "stock answer" files, for ease of dealing with standard issues like duplicate bugs, insufficient information ("X is broken"), and requests for when the next version will be available.

Seems to me that this should have been the FIRST response. Its a good thing Debian is a volunteer project. Anywhere else, his ass would have been shit-canned with extreme prejudice. Hell, I think even most volunteer projects would can you for something like that.

Re:Branden Robinson

[dmaxwell]

It's buried in a corner of the X-Strike Force webserver. It's titled "The_Real_Motto.jpg" or something like that.

Re:Branden Robinson

[martinde]

> Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness

Branden has really mellowed out a lot over the years. He did a decent job communicating as treasurer of SPI[1], and I think he is ready for the role of DPL. Time will tell, of course, but I find his initial email encouraging.

[1] SPI has had several "accounting scandals", info is publically available if you're interested. Some people want to lay the blame at Branden's feet, but IMHO it was a situation that he inherited, not one of his own making.

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

Branden Robinson led the Debian X strike force that patched and packaged XFree86 for Debian. During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended. At the time I continued using Debian, and just built my own copy of X for a while, but I would say that his attitude is one of the significant reasons I no longer use Debian.

Long ago,I had emailed a question to Branden about xfree86 and promptly received a helpful answer from him.

Last summer, I had the pleasure of spending time with him in person (at the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco). I would categorize his attitude toward the Debian Project is "no nonsense" although he does have a quirky sense of humor (which I happen to appreciate).

It seems that your non-appreciation of his sense of humor was a major influence in your choice to stop using Debian. That is very unfortunate, however I think that choosing to use, or not use, one of the finest distributions around, based on a joke (which the picture you describe most certainly was) that you took personally, is a shortsighted mistake on your part.

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's on the top of Branden's own web page, though he has cropped the text off, how subtle of him. :)

Re:Branden Robinson

[justins]

I'll take a good honest, humorous "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" over canned corporate PR bullshit any day.

It isn't as though those are the only two options...

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

"Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!"

I think the slogan was actually "How about a nice cup of shut the fuck up?"

I can't blame Branden for using it, with all the crap he's had to deal with...

Re:Branden Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't as though those are the only two options...

It wasn't on any debian.org main pages and chances are people were either going to that specific page to see if their mouths would help speed an X upgrade along or they probably already knew Branden's humour. I frankly found it quite amusing when I first saw it.

Re:Branden Robinson

[JianTian13]

Umm, not flaming you as such, but this needs to be up here, lest everybody think that Debian in general and Branden in particular are a bunch of assholes.

That graphic went up during a time when X was in flux, there had been a major upstream release, and Branden was trying really, really hard to provide a consistent, stable set of packages for X across all the umpteen platforms that Debian officially supports. This is a very, very hard thing to do. And while Branden was trying to do all this, there were the legions of i386 n00bs jumping up and down, moaning complaining, and not contributing, asking "Hey, when are you going to give me my updated X packages??!?!!!one"

Branden at some point got sick of it, and simply told people what they deperately needed to hear: HAANCOSTFU.

Re:Branden Robinson

[macshit]

I think the problem lies with you, not with Branden.

There are a lot of obnoxious twits in the FOSS world, who are quick to flame for silly reasons -- but Branden is not one of them. He neither ignores people nor throws around gratuitous insults. If you compare him to a real flame-master (read a BSD development list sometime...) he seems almost boring.

He isn't afraid to call a spade a spade though, nor to use humor, and he apparently doesn't subscribe to white-bread corporate standards for discourse.

I personally find his honesty, straight-forwardness, and humor refreshing, and think his election is a very good thing for Debian.

Re:Branden Robinson

[justins]

It wasn't on any debian.org main pages and chances are people were either going to that specific page to see if their mouths would help speed an X upgrade along or they probably already knew Branden's humour. I frankly found it quite amusing when I first saw it.

I did too, but that is because I prefer laughing at Debian users to being one.

Pictorial karma whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Picture of Branden Robinson

More pictures

Branden a long time ago

Re:Pictorial karma whore

[beef3k]

Looks like it should be possible to spend at least half of it putting Mr. Robinson on a diet.

Oh, and it helps to log in if you're trying to get into that karma whoring thing.

DEBIAN IS DEAD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to put it out of it's miseries. Kill it now. shoot it in the head. Deborah and Ian are dead.

Ubuntu rules!

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[donscarletti]

They are non-standard" CPUs because nobody uses them. Putting money into supporting them doesn't do jack for the average user. Putting it to work improving support for x86, x86-64, or PPC would do a hell of a lot more good for the distro's users (the ones who donated the money to begin with).

Gentoo?

[rdwald]

What, is Gentoo no longer a "maintained distro"?

Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Debian. And I love the way it is being released. You can always use testing or unstable on desktops (it works bloody well) and stable on servers. I am not going to upgrade server every 6 months or so. If it was a new Debian plan I would probably switch to another distro. Hmm. But everything depends how long will be every release supported (security patches etc.)

Anyway, so far - Debian rulez ;))

Re:Hmm.

[Vo0k]

There's a small problem with that...
Since the "stable" was released, a lot of apps included in it have been released in newer "stable" versions with numerous bugfixes - so instead of getting pre-alpha quality package from "Stable" (which was included because it was the only thing that was there at that time) I force upgrade to "1.0 stable" version from the "unstable" tree, because it's a year old and proven to be stable, as opposed to 5 years old, pre-alpha. Recently installed Dosemu from the stable tree, for some important work that could be done only with certain ancient DOS application. It kept crashing. Unstable Dosemu worked like a charm - bug fixed.
Because of this ages-long release cycle, there's NO REASON TO USE STABLE at all. Because it still has bugs that have been fixed years ago in other releases, making it LESS stable than most newer "unstable" distros.

Re:Hmm.

[gl4ss]

hehheh, good point.

though, with unstable you might need to mess with the configuration every so often(not that it really happens that often but...).

Re:Hmm.

[eraserewind]

Stable apparently means "unchanging" not "reliable".

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct.

"Stable" means that if it works now, it will work later. Once you have it running you can fetch security updates that are carefully backported to ensure compatibility. You can automatically update to the latest packages overnight without having your mailserver or database server crash because "oh shit! the configuration file changed AGAIN" (happened to me, postgres 6.x->7.x added an extra column to the access control file, didnt mention that in the changelog so mine was missing a column, and I spent over an hour trying to figure out why the server was segfaulting without any kind of error message when I tried to connect to it.)

If you're using something like dosemu, its highly unlikely that you need this kind of low-maintenance assurance from your distribution, and you probably could live on testing or unstable.

Re:Hmm.

[borggraefe]

Because of this ages-long release cycle, there's NO REASON TO USE STABLE at all.

There is one very important reason: Security Updates. There is no reliable security support for testing and unstable.

Re:Hmm.

[Vo0k]

But there is, for other, much more stable (newer) distributions of Linux, that contain newer software with less bugs -total- (not just -security-).

Debian, the fossil

[AvantLegion]

Debian is quickly becoming akin to a fossil. It sits there, not actually doing anything. But it leaves evidence of having done something in the past.

dancing around the obvious

[timmarhy]

people get pissed off with donating to debian because they never make any releases.

stop complaining about stable

[Anonymous Coward]

i use libranet, which has debian underneath. i didnt pay my cable bill so it was cut off for about 2 weeks, when i apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -- i had like 400+ updates with about 90-100mb total.

ive had 2-3 months uptime before the power went out.

Ownage!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hail to the King baby! 12345678 is all mine! Muhahah muahahahaha...

Re:Ownage!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, but joo fail it.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

I see assloads of AlphaServers on eBay for $100-$500 each. I doubt it's the lack of machines or money. It's that nobody gives a crap about putting modern software on dead hardware.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

You mentioned x86-64 and PPC yourself. You realize that covers different word size and endianness systems - the two most common portability problems. After those, the problems tend to be people testing for specific architectures rather than properties. That said, what's needed is developer awareness and debugging, not necessarily more machinery.

You Fail It!

[Anonymous Coward]

Loser!

Security team

[XanC]

But the "testing" distribution is always the last to get security fixes. That's really the big advantage of stable: Quick, backported security fixes. Won't get that with Sarge until the release.

Re:Security team

[ajs318]

Bear in mind that Debian contains almost the whole of Open Source: accounting for all 12 architectures, there are something like 100 000 packages in Debian.

My suggestion would be to ditch binary package support for all except i386 and PPC architectures and life-or-death security updates to other architectures. The newer 64-bit architectures are more than fast enough to deal with compiling everything from source; and, as long as those source packages actually do compile eventually on the more esoteric architectures, it's not really a problem -- if you're running a weirdy machine, you probably can wait a little longer. Binary packages would only really be necessary in cases when there literally was not enough time to compile the patched version without running a serious risk of getting compromised.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, those portability problems were almost entirely fixed a long time ago. The problem with weird platforms is the lack of developers for core stuff like the kernel and gcc.

Support bleeding-edge CPUs, not old ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree about the obsolete CPUs; but new CPUs (IBM/Sony CELL chips) would be a great thing to support. Wouldn't it be cool if Linux supported Itanium before Windows did.

Re:Support bleeding-edge CPUs, not old ones.

[m50d]

Linux supported amd64 long before windows did. Didn't seem to do us much good.

one word

[AngryElmo]

Soy Sauce.

Oh I take that back. Two words then. Soy Sauce or Teriyaki...

damnit I give up

Re:one word

[magefile]

Our primary tool is fear ... fear and surprise ... fear and surprise and soy sauce ... fear and surprise and soy sauce and teriaki - I'll just start over, then, shall I?

Re:one word

[chris_mahan]

or mayonnaise.

Will you people please decide what you want?

[lahvak]

Every time somebody mentions dpendency problems, rpm etc. in any discussion, people always start yelling "debian, debian, use debian" and "apt, apt, apt!"

They are right about the first. Debian is probably the easiest distro to upgrade and maintain. Part of the secret is apt, that's true, but only a small part. The main reason debian "just works" and is so easy to maintain is the official repositories. You don't have dependency problems in debian (most of the time) because debian developers took enormous care to resolve all the dependency problems for you. Debian carefully backports(!) all security fixes they can, making sure that nothing breaks in the process, so that if there is a security hole fixed in say php, all your pages will just keep working like before. They have more packages than most other distros pot together, and they run on more hardware than enybody else. All this just takes some time.

I am not afraid debian will become irrelevant. There is a reason all these new distros are based on debian. And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian. Debian stable may not be the system for a hobbyist's desktop, but a large company or city or whatnot does not care about frequent releases. On the contrary, the longer they can go without major update the better. And when the update actually does come, debian makes it easy with their repositories, their stable/testing/unstable system, and apt.

And if you are a hobbyist, use testing/unstable and contribute your share. Debian is a community, not a company, and if use debian, you are part of the community. You want releases to happen more often? Then do your share. Do you use testing or unstable? Submit bug reports, fixes, if you are not a programmer, fix or update some bloody documentation, provide some missing icons, whatever! The only way debian can become irrelevant or obsolete is if we let it go irrelevant or obsolete.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[Homology]

And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian.

Uhm, it's not Debian but SuSE.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[Cro Magnon]

Yes, there IS a reason these new distros are based on Debian. But NONE of them are based on Woody! There's a difference between stable and rigor mortis. Even conservative companies eventually get new machines, and Woody won't even install on many new boxen!

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lwn.net/Articles/132396/ :

ZDNet UK reports that the City of Munich has chosen to migrate its 14,000 desktops to Debian.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[AigariusDebian]

You don't seam to be following the news - Munich choose a company that provided a Debian based solution.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[Rinikusu]

I used to be one of those "I wish Debian were more up-to-date" people until I got a server that was going to be used strictly for... serving. That's when I realized I don't need the "flash" of the latest greatest GNOME or KDE or fancy audio players or anything like that (headless server). I just need a machine that can run Apache, PHP (wordpress + Gallery), and MySQL. And I need this machine to be easily updateable with the lastest security updates. And for this, I have discovered that Debian is ideal: For machines you just want to work and mostly forget about.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[mindstrm]

Yes, but as one of those server people, I want the latest versions of PHP, Postgres, Apache, Perl, Python, MySQL, and a few other select server packages.

I sure don't get any of that with 'stable'.

Debian was a good fire-and-forget system when stable was released 3 years ago.. nowadays, it's just as good.. as long as 3 year old packages are okay with you.

Re:Will you people please decide what you want?

[m50d]

How do the fixes help? This is a serious question. When I first came to linux over 18 months ago, sarge was going to be released real soon now. In all the time since then, the only visible progress I have seen is the new installer. Ok, helping to bugfix that helps, but for the rest, how is fixing things going to make sarge get released any sooner? Because I can't see how it's going to make a difference. If they'd freeze it, then I'd know I was helping - once all the bugs are gone, it's ready for release, so the sooner we get rid of this bug the sooner the release. But at the moment, I really can't see how anything I do is going to make any difference to when sarge is released.

Gentoo Donations!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually all of the money from Gentoo donations and the store goes directly to Daniel Robbins. There is quite a bit of conflict between Daniel and the
other gentoo developers over this issue!

Re:Gentoo Donations!!

[rdwald]

The original Slashdot article regarding Robbins's resignation makes no mention of this. Do you have a source?

Linux's management system back to bite them

[Kjella]

There's several issues with Debian stable.

1. Hardware support. Unlike Windows, you can't drop in a 3rd party driver, you need to upgrade the whole kernel. This is by design (no stable ABI).

2. Inability to update core systems. No software is ever officially "adopted" into stable. Why? Dependencies. Imagine if they could say "this version of [core software] is now so stable, we'll provide equal support with the original in stable".

Debian stable is only good for systems that have been virtually unchanged since release, both when it comes to hardware and software. Hey if it works, don't break it. But what can Debian offer for new servers?

The new "stable" will fall into the same obscurity if the same release system keeps up. They should try to support 10000 packages/3yrs + 20 extra releases of core apps/6mo, not just 10000 packages every three years. Server apps don't have that insanely many deps as desktops.

Hardware, well that's just not easy with the current model. But solving half the problem is better than solving none of it.

Kjella

Re:Linux's management system back to bite them

[xgamer04]

There's several issues with Debian stable.

1. Hardware support. Unlike Windows, you can't drop in a 3rd party driver, you need to upgrade the whole kernel. This is by design (no stable ABI).

So you're saying other Linux distros have a stable ABI when you upgrade a kernel??

That's just lovely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you can pick the winners, which in itself is a service worth most of the returns.

Re:Endowment? -- donation link info

[samjam]

By the time I got this far it seemed to complicated so I gave up.

It's hardly good for impulsive donations, and certainly a long way away from 1-click-ordering.

I did suggest they take pay-pal to make it easy for people to donate quickly and simply. I was told they had talked about it before and would bring it up again later.

In normal debian timescales they could be getting on quite quickly with making debian donations easy.

I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.

Sam

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Spy Hunter]

What kind of logic is that? Debian isn't harder to install than Gentoo, and everything's always precompiled which is more convenient. Furthermore, Debian puts a lot of work into every supported architecture (of which there are a lot), to the point where they practically port software such as XFree86 to those architectures themselves. No other Linux distribution does that, including Gentoo. Just because you're compiling from source doesn't mean it will work on any architecture. And to the extent that Gentoo does work on other architectures, it should probably thank Debian for finding the bugs and submitting the patches.

Sign of genius?

[RandySC]

Interpersonal skills are sometimes inversely proportional to genius.

Re:Sign of genius?

[dabigpaybackski]

It worked for Newton.

Re:Sign of genius?

[dfghjk]

only sometimes. They are also sometimes inversely proportional to stupidity. So what.

Re:Sign of genius?

[Al Dimond]

I think, really, they're fairly independent. There are geniuses with great interpersonal skills, and geniuses without. It can sometimes be harder to notice genius in people with good interpersonal skills for a number of reasons. One is that by communicating their ideas more effectively they make them sound less difficult. Also they might try to quietly improve things rather than making lots of noise about things they disagree with. And when working in groups they do a better job of involving the other group members.

As a fairly smart person with mediocre interpersonal skills, these are things I've noticed about many smart people with good interpersonal skills that I've worked with.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when has MIPS been "non-standard" ?
Typical Wintel mentality from this poster.

I don't know if this post will even go through using my 'non-standard' PPC box.

Debian Assets

[davidmat]

Is it normal for the DPL not to know where all Debian assets are located?

Sarge must become stable

[lix]

Our university is relying heavily on Debian-based Linux systems in all areas. Therefore, we have decided to make a rather generous donation to the Debian project, with one caveat: Sarge must become stable.

You're feeding a dead horse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid! You're feeding dead horse.

Replace all of your debian boxes with Ubuntu Linux! That is the only sensible thing you can do on a tricky situation like this.

Re:You're feeding a dead horse!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only sensible thing would be for you to stop trolling but I don't see that coming along either.

intereting part

[suezz]

"An argument in favor of that is that we should do so in the event we, or one of our developers, are sued for doing something we consider legitimate, like offering freely modifiable software gratis to the world," Robinson said."

sadly those days may be closer than we all think - especially if all the "intellectual property/patent lawyers" have their way in the US.

please UK do not adopt software patents. there is no need for them and they are totally ridiculous.

If you don't spend money nothing gets done!

[Anonymous Coward]

It pretty simple.
It's 'partially' why IRAQ ain't rebuilt. And I guess they lost money too.... there's a lesson here.

Nix the sending people to conferences.

[Anonymous Coward]

Use those wacky zany new contraptions called computers via text, sound, and video. Really, I see a hard time for them justifying why it's necessary for the revenge of the nerds goes to camp skits.

Re:Nix the sending people to conferences.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and the delegation from Elgothania can spin their generator cranks and chat using voice over carrier pigeon.

Oh wait, you thought Debian still used i386 packages because they were too lazy to change some compiler options? It's quite the popular distribution for the third world where people run on donated old crap.

A Viable Business Model For Debian

[varjag]

1. Collect the donations.
2. Hire numerous lawyers.
3. ???
4. Profit!

1 million not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

With 1 million and 10 coders for a year, that works out to 100000 per year per coder. Now to have 2 coders for life, means that your 1 million will have to hit 25% at least year to year, to cover the salary and beat inflation. (this is a lower assumtion of inflation but we are considering a longer time line),

One could possibly yield ~10% year on year. But after inflation (and we are not even considering management fees) this really isnt that much. Now it is true that very good investers can hit more in some years. But the fees they charge are also very high. I think it is something along the lines of 2% of total regardless of performance, and >20% of any profits.

In short, the endownment idea isnt as simple as it sounds. The amount of time/money/effort needed to set it up is very high. Universities have entire staff dedicate to managing their endownments. Look at Harvard for example. The performance is very very good, but the salaries of the investment staff are not low.

Better to use the money up quickly as incentives to developers or educate consumers. That way more coders can be hired.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[nametaken]

Debian is the only maintained distro I'm aware of that still supports Alpha, let alone MIPS or other "non-standard" CPUs. I can appreciate the "let's light a fire under the developer's asses" rhetoric, but that doesn't solve pressing problems, like a lack of builds for "orphan" architectures. There are people out there that still want a Linux distro that works for their machine, and they don't always run x86;

Or perhaps find some competant people to fork Debian into a distro for bizarre, dead arches? Hell, give em 10k in startup. Then this wide support won't choke Debian to death anymore, and we get another distro to focus on archane systems.

Just an idea. Seems like everyone wins.

"X Strike Force?"

[Praxxus]

H. Sebastian Christ, no wonder Debian is going downhill! "X Strike Force" couldn't get much nerdier, could it? It makes me think that Debian has lost mind share not because of Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc., but rather because the 14 year-old boys that used to work on it have discovered girls (or other boys) and/or moved out of their parents' basement.

"X Strike Force," indeed! Yeesh!

Re:"X Strike Force?"

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you're so cool! tell us what to name our teams!
alternatively, HANCOSTFU.

Re:"X Strike Force?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has lost mindshare because it stopped improving. Debian developers by and large are satisfied with debian as is, and normal people can't deal with debian as is without at least the hope for improvement. It's why I gave up on debian on the desktop (and by extension linux on the desktop, since the other distro's manage the unthinkable of being even worse).

Windows (!) is a better desktop than debian. That is so sad.

Re:"X Strike Force?"

[coj]

Really dude. It's a stupid, stupid name. Just accept it and move on.

Rice?

[wiredog]

Lucky bastard.

Re:Rice?

[denebola]

>Lucky Bastard. lol, prefect comment in my opinion. my only possible response is... Cartman: "am I to understand there will be no side dishes with our waffles tonight?"

Re:Rice?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. When I was young we we so poor and hungry we went to Neverland Ranch for the protein...

Re:Rice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow!

Re:Rice?

[sp0rk173]

BAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAH*gasp *HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh dear god, man. Beautiful.

apt-torrent?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Actually, Debian could drop most of their mirrors by using apt-torrent, people would download all their packages with torrent (which fits very well in the APT model, just add a deb http://127.0.0.1:6968/ line to your sources.list) and mirrors wouldn't be neccesary.

Only MD5's and PGP signs would have to be stored at debian.org servers - to save yourself from hacked packages.

Re:apt-torrent?

[AeiwiMaster]

That is cool !

But trying to install it on my system running testing I get :

Setting up apt-torrent (0.1.1-2) ...
Creating new apt_torrent group apttorrent [done]
Creating new apt_torrent user apttorrentCouldn't create /home/apttorrent: Permission denied.
Cleaning up.
Removing directory `/home/apttorrent'
Removing user `apttorrent'.
dpkg: error processing apt-torrent (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
apt-torrent
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Yes, I do mount /home over nfs.

Re:apt-torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's a fucking awful idea...you should be slapped by the bandwidth monkey

Re:apt-torrent?

[AeiwiMaster]

Does anyone know of a mirror for testing ?

Stable is successfully stable

[SgtChaireBourne]

Actually, I'd call the unchanged state (except for patches) of Debian a huge succcess.

Stable is just that, stable. If you don't get that then you're missing the point.

With stable you get patches and bug fixes, but not different versions with their changed funtionality and unkowns. That's what you want in a production environment, stablility, whether it's a server somewhere or on your desktop. And Debian delivers that.

If you want new things, then there are probably specific things that you have in mind, not usually a general desire to change everything randomly.

If you want, it's possible to maintain a mixed system, so that you have the new packages you want without otherwise messing with your production environment.

whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

oh shut the...
oh, hahahahaha

quote

[zogger]

"But if you try to maintain a core package of the distribution things change. You don't spend most of your time on package development anymore but on fighting the flood of bug reports and inquiries."

well...ya, that's what is important to end users, especially in a commercial setting.
And this attitude is why stuff is in perpetual betaware status, people don't care about fixing what is broke. It's your right as a free developer to code whatever you want,please go right ahead and thanks for the efforts, just don't be surprised if most people move on to other projects/distros where "just works" is more important than "ohh, new shiny", and where the larger sums of money/interest/mindshare go.

Re:quote

[Deeze]

"don't be surprised if most people move on to other projects/distros where "just works" is more important than "ohh, new shiny""

Umm, guess Debian is the one that "just works" and Ubuntu is "ohh, new shiny", as that is what my experience has been (ohh, shiny... *crash*... opps). My prediction is that as soon as Sarge goes stable everyone (well, not everyone, but a lot of them) using Ubuntu will come back to Debian.. cause there's nothing like the real thing baby!

Re:quote

[zogger]

My opinion only, but Ubuntu took off because a millionaire threw quite a lot of cash at it. Advertising pays, and shipping multiple quantities of free cds to people didn't hurt either. The same effort and cash put someplace else and the rankings would reflect that "Fred's-nix" would have been as "successful".

If Debian as a political org would be a bit more in touch with economic reality, they might have gotten some of that cash and maybe not be so broke.

But basically, I don't see any large difference there with all the other Debian clones, I've tried several. It's still Debian. I think Knoppix is really the first clone to do something completely different and *slick* and I am much more impressed with their efforts.

Re:quote

[Deeze]

I agree with you 100%.. other than the part about Debian being broke, because they're not (a non-profit organization's books aren't gonna, nor should they have to or be expected to, look like an actual companies books). That is a bit of Slash-sensationalism there :).

Knoppix is my back-up distro, for when I poke Debian in the wrong way and it bites me hehe.

Re:quote

[macshit]

don't be surprised if most people move on to other projects/distros where "just works" is more important than "ohh, new shiny"

From what I can see "oooh, shiny!" appears to be the driving force behind most linux distros -- and the reason many users choose what they do. MS-windows and macos pretty much have commuter-passes on the oooh-shiny-wagon...

Indeed, I'd say that "boring solidity" is actually a strength of debian.

Jerk, plain and simple

[talaphid]

Because noone likes lukewarm cans of shut the @$@@ up. They're supposed to be served warm.

Re:Jerk, plain and simple

[Deeze]

So... stick it in the microwave. Then you get your can 'o shut the @$@@ up at the temperature you desire, plus a nice light show to keep you amused while you wait :D.

Re:Jerk, plain and simple

[justins]

Because noone likes lukewarm cans of shut the @$@@ up. They're supposed to be served warm.

Where I come from we have a saying. Shut the @$@@ up is a dish best served cold.

Deborah and Ian have separated.

[Anonymous Coward]

DEBorah and IAN are dead. DEBIAN IS DEAD! It is time for everyone to accept the obvious fact. Denial just leads to a lot of mental problems.

..but it's time to REJOICE because we have OS that just works - UBUNTU!. Ubuntu means 'humanity to others'. Humanity means being a human. Be a human, choose Ubuntu!

Best decision I've made in years

[Anonymous Coward]

I ditched Debian and installed Ubuntu. No more monkey business! No hassle! Ubuntu just works.

Bollocks.

[mindstrm]

Debian stable was CURRENT when it came out... it had up to date versions of critical software, it was an attractive solution for business. It still could be, if they'd get their act together and have more frequent stable releases.

Please quit pretending that's stable is 3 years old out of some wise plan. it was never supposed to be this out of date. STABLE refers to package depenedencies, not to the software's ability to not crash.

I am begging for debian to release a stable set of software that's not half a decade out of date, or I'm going to switch to something else, because if I can't run 2 year old software on it without doing it by hand from source, what's the point of using Debian?

Donate it to Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

They should donate all 40K to the Ubuntu team. Six month release cycles require a lot more work than maintaining piddly ole' Sarge.

Naming problems

[Kludge]

I think Debian has naming problems. People don't want to run a distribution that is "unstable". When you say "unstable", people think MS windows, and, of course, it's nothing like that. Perhaps they should rename them to "Rock-solid" and "Stable".

Re:Debian is dying.

[Anonymous Coward]

After hearing the same thing said of NetBSD, I can proudly say, "Finances confirm it....Debian is dying!" :)

How many boxes do you admin?

[coyote-san]

Let me guess, you're only managing your own systems. Maybe a pet system or two at work.

How many other employees depend on your systems to get their work done? How many CUSTOMERS depend on your systems? How many of these systems do you have immediate access to if there's a problem, vs. systems colocated at ISPs so you have thick pipes to the internet?

I know, you referred to "rock solid" stable. You're right about that, but wrong that that's only servers with heavy loads. Anything that others depend on must be "rock solid." That includes user-facing interfaces since the cost of retraining staff can be significant.

That's why "stable" is so important. Live systems aren't set up and then left alone, they're "updated" frequently in order to catch security fixes. Updating 'testing' or 'unstable' means the system is constantly changing and the source of a problem may not be easily identified or fixed. Updating against 'stable' should be safe.

Even with backported security patches packages that are 2-3 year old can cause serious problems. E.g., we can't run the latest version of some of our applications because they depend on a more recent version of perl. But we can't update perl without blowing out half of our packages. Doing that will make the system too unstable for use for the reason mentioned above.

That's why Debian really needs mini-releases on a regular basis, e.g., perhaps on a semiannual basis. Probably <500 packages account for 95% of all installed packages and that's a subset small enough to be frequently tested. The rest of the packages could probably be loaded from 'testing' at little risk.

Re:How many boxes do you admin?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Agreed that security is another area where Rock Solid Stability is central. I should have seen that. But I won't ever really "get" what you mean re: "That includes user-facing interfaces since the cost of retraining staff can be significant." I tend to change window mangers (Ion default, Gnome, WindowMaker, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment) just to change the scenery. I'll run kpdf or xpdf instead of gpdf just because they *do* look different. I accept that people like the UI to remain the same only because I see Mac and Windows people proclaiming the benefits, but my acceptence is tinged in disbelief. I have to wonder, do these people drive the same exact path to the grocery store every time?

Re:Debian is dying.

[smittyoneeach]

Yep. Time will Tell if that shark-jumping troll signifies the end of Debian.

I tried - they didn't cash my check

[kelleher]

I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.

I tried donating once about 2 years ago. Unfortunately (for Debian and the SPI), I raised a big stink about them not accepting Paypal, credit cards, or anything electronic. This wasn't received very well. I finally just sent them a check for $50 but it was never cashed. I don't know whether it was lost or if the treasurer just decided he didn't want my money.

Re:I tried - they didn't cash my check

[OA]

I don't know whether it was lost or if the treasurer just decided he didn't want my money.

There were some issues between the bank and SPI. SPI decided not to deposit checkes to prevent fraud and protect donation.

SPI did not realized old checks can not be cashed later. SPI had good people with programing skills but they were week on money handling.

So your check was more likely to be never cashed. I think some notice to the doner were sent out but I am not very familiar with the incidents.

Anyway, this is not something SPI should be proud of. I think they have been working hard to fix situation. This new SPI wab page seems to be their way to improve situation.

Let me quote SPI site

Because information posted to SPI's website was used to defraud one of our checking accounts years ago, we do not publish information about our accounts sufficient for donors to initiate wire transfers. (Due in part to our dissatisfication with the security safeguards of that bank, SPI no longer does business with them.) If you would like to donate to SPI or one of our member projects via wire transfer, please contact the SPI Treasurer to make arrangements.

Please do not attempt to donate to SPI via PayPal or a similar service. If any account is registered with a payee that claims to be "SPI", be aware that it is not associated with Software in the Public Interest, Inc. and may be fraudulent.

All for the love of Ubuntu

[KingBahamut]

I see all this push for Ubuntu, if I were Branden, Id be somewhat depresssed. What I see needing to happen is for Branden to push for Base only. If Debian releases base only -- and thus letting all the other clones release on top of that, Debian will have a decent release schedule. Branden has to see this. Let the smaller maintainers get together to clean up the reponsitory.

Concentrating on a full release and to clean up the current repositories and release full dist on top of that is talking some crazy.

Ubuntu is good, it works, its somewhat stable and I use it for 90% of my machines at home. But do not forget that with no Debian, there would be NO Ubuntu. Nor would Canonical exist in its current form.

I wish Branden the best , I hope he can straighted out that mess.

Re:All for the love of Ubuntu

[gnuman99]

Only the base can hold Debian releases. Other applications do not because they can be removed from the release. Right now, the slow release cycle has nothing to do with X, KDE or GNOME or any other package but the base. The RC bugs in base are showstoppers. The RC bugs in other packages will just make these packages disappear from the release.

Debian is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It's dead, Jim.

Apt sources

[phorm]

For my desktop machine I've used debian 'unstable' for quite awhile and had very good luck with it.

I've had good luck with "backports" for finding packages to upgrade my decrepit stable packages, and for those that want to mix+match just add something like:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable clamav samba

or

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing apache apache-ssl

in that case

[Anonymous Coward]

they need MORE stable releases. Once a year can't be *that* hard.

Re:Well ... (offtopic)

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curosity, what math software do you like to work with?

Debian Stable

[kyoko21]

I constantly hear people whine about Debian Stable not being "up-to-date enough" that it's just annoying. Why? Debian is FREE. The users of Debian (that is us) have the right to whine and grope all we want. But at the end of the day, unless you are actually participating in the cause, contributing source code, fund-raising, or anything that could help move the release along, please stop using Debian. The Debian community isn't forcing you to use their FREE software. No one is holding a gun or forcing you to drink hemlock to use Debian. It is FREE and it will always be FREE.

Debian Stable, though it may be old, it is still a baseline. From an administrative and control management point of view, having a clear, concise baseline to start from is absolutely critical. The argument that it won't run on new hardware is not a really a valid argument because it was not targeted to run on hardware it had not been released yet. This argument is about as valid as someone claiming that AMD Opteron sucks because they can't execute software that was written for the PDP-11.

Debian Stable is like a wooden #2 pencil. It works for what it is designed to do. Like a real pencil, it too has its flaws. These flaws, depending on how you use it, may or may not be avoided. You certainly would not want to use a pencil when signing your signature on an important document. Some debian security holes or deprecated software may or may not be a risk.

Unless you are Paris Hilton and you need all your writing instruments to be encrusted with diamonds and jewls, you have a choice to use Debian.

Re:Debian Stable

[Anonymous Coward]

The users of Debian (that is us) have the right to whine and grope all we want.

Pornographic Debian? How strangely erotic!

No sober person could possibly find that amusing.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been drinking again, haven't you?

Re:A better use for 40k

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate the comments, but:

1) Gentoo is not Debian, vis-a-vis binary packages are not source builds. If I wanted source builds, I would have picked Gentoo.

2) Gentoo does NOT support nearly as many architectures as Debian. I appreciate the fact that it supports Alpha, etc. but that's not quite the same as being able to have a consistent environment across several different machines, some of which may or may not be alive, dead, in business environments, or simply hobby machines. Flexability is the point, and Gentoo's source-build technique is getting there...but still needs more work.

3) Supporting future processors is great, but it's interesting that in the same "thread" someone mentions support for the "Itanic"...oops, Itanium, a "future processor" that is essentially still-born from Intel's brain-damaged attempt to merge PA-RISC with X86. Not everything that is new and shiny is gold...sometimes, it's fool's gold.

4) The Cell is still in tape-out. It's a great idea, and has lots of potential, but let's not count the chicken's eggs before they hatch.

5) For gawd's sake, a used Alpha is about $250, a used SGI Indy is about $150, etc. I don't think it would be that hard to buy a few of these older "relics" and put them to work on the build farm. We're still talking about a minimal investment in terms of hardware.

6) Keeping the old stuff around forces people to write portable code, ie. when the next new shiny "gee whiz it does it all" chip comes out, having code that has been ported to 11 different chipsets means that you'll likely get it to run on the first try...instead of futzing around with it for weeks, trying to figure out why it will not compile...we're doing ourselves a favor here by keeping these oldies around, they actually HELP the stability of the installation and the base of software that is available.

Just some more points to ponder...

Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies, but this is an off-topic test post to see if Commander Taco has revoked my posting privs for making a statement that doesn't adhere to slashdot dogma.

Compile Farm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a bunch of high-end computers for primary target releases, so debain maintainers could use them to compile the packages.

This would help speed things up.

Re:Naming problems (Not entirely. . .)

[JSBiff]

I work for a company that develops software, and Linux is one of our supported platforms for a couple of our products.

What are we looking for in a 'stable' distribution? Simple - that the core system packages and dependencies are not changing on an almost daily basis. We want to know that if we have tested our products against Debian, that they will still work next week (and not need to be recompiled because some library package changed suddenly).

The 'stable' moniker has less to do with OS stability in terms of up-time, and more to do with stability in the sense of "It is what it is". Debian stable doesn't really change, so we know that if our product works with Debian stable today, it should work next week.

I work in the tech support department, and I hate to tell people that we cannot support Debian testing. But, we don't officially [though I try to give people some tips on how they might go about trying to get it working], because from a practical standpoint, there is no real guarantee stuff won't change next week.

But, since Debian stable is so old, most people are using testing (as the parent suggests), because stable doesn't have recent package versions.

The reason Debian NEEDS a stable release soon, is so that it can be a 'supported platform' for many, many companies.

And this transcends software development and support: while 'testing' is usually quite good about not breaking stuff, on my computer at home I've had XFree stop working numerous times after updating Debian, because the Linux kernel had changed and I needed to recompile the nvidia kernel module (the frustrating thing was, the linux kernel package was the exact same version of the Linux kernel, just a different build; e.g. was running linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-1 and it got upgraded to linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-2 or something like that - I don't remember the exact version numbers).

So, from a system administration standpoint, you wouldn't want to necessarily deploy Debian 'testing' to a bunch of workstations, because they might break overnight.

You might not want to deploy debian testing on a server, again, because every time you run an update on the server (to ensure you have the latest security fixes), your server might suddenly stop working (rare, but it can happen).

These are the reasons people want a 'stable' distribution. One that isn't changing *constantly*, but does have fairly recent versions of popular packages.

To me, the answer is that Debian should split off non-core packages from the distro, and version them seperately. That way, it would be a heck of a lot easier for them to release an updated 'stable' version of the core distro every 3 or 6 months, and as packages move from one 'stable' version to another 'stable' version of the package, you could just update that package.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you missed the "quotes". As in, I really don't give a shit about Wintel; my box is an Alpha, I work with Macs all day, and you're assuming too much (Assume = Ass + U + Me). Cool your jets and realize I'm actually SUPPORTING your MIPS-based boxen via Debian.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

(Yes, I'm the parent poster) There are some issues there...

1) There aren't "assloads" of these machines on eBay, unless a single page of hits means "bonanza!" to you...

2) You don't get it. It's about portability, consistency, and support. It's about telling hardware vendors where they can shove their planned obsolesence (misp. I know, I'm too tired to correct spelling right now)

3) You still don't get it. Go play with your x86 boxes.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[Anonymous Coward]

(Yes, I am the parent poster) This is somewhat in line with what the build maintainers were proposing a little while back - make the "older" arches a separate build process that is not directly holding up the mainline builds. The theory was that the stuff being held up would trickle its way down into the "lesser" groups, so we still get 11+ arches, just some of them faster than others. An idea to be entertained, for sure.

Money Problems and Sitting On Their Hands

[Master Bait]

Debian wouldn't have money problems if they released some software.

Re:Money Problems and Sitting On Their Hands

[John Hasler]

> Debian wouldn't have money problems if they
> released some software.

Debian doesn't have any money problems.

what do you mean "flat broke"??

[noahm]

Debian has no operating costs! Developer time, hardware, bandwidth, etc is all donated. $40k will last as long as it needs to. Debian could operate on a fraction of that with no impact.

noah

Re:No sober person could possibly find that amusin

[Profane MuthaFucka]

You can only drink again if you stopped at some point. So, no.

3rd Party Drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia? HighPoint? I know i've used their 3rd party linux drivers with nary a kernel recompile, and I know there are others.

No on Paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

Paypal has a bad record of holding money and sometimes not sending it all through. I won't use them.

Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C

[labradort]

You've got that backwards. Debian supports more platforms than Gentoo,
and it has done so years before Gentoo existed.

In any case, using money for hardware is probably
the last way Debian are going to spend it. They
also ask for donated hardware. This is
cheaper for all concerned (the donor can ask
for a higher than eBay dollar value on their
charitable gift receipt) if it is possible and shipping isn't too much.

For newer hardware, the maker of that hardware
should realize it is in their interest to
provide the equipment for developers,
so that they can say it is supported under Linux!

split to debian desktop and debian server

[Lord Ender]

They really need to split in to Debian Desktop and Debian Server. This would enable both to have more frequent releases. The server distro could release probably twice yearly because they would have many fewer dependencies to worry about (and no GNOME stuff, for example). The desktop distro could release more often because it would not have to hold itself to the extreme stability requirements that a server distro requires. It would be a win for everyone. I might actually be able to start using Debian again.

Is Pay Pal really a good idea?

[hedora]

Pay Pal's security is terrible, and they have a bad habit of seizing money from people's accounts without launching a proper investigation. If someone successfully compromised SPI's bank account, their Pay Pal account would certainly be broken into.

For more information about why Pay Pal should not be used for large amounts of money, google for "pay pal complaints".

On the other hand, SPI should accept some form of electronic payment... Credit cards, maybe?

Re:Is Pay Pal really a good idea?

[samjam]

I think they do take credit cards but the chocie to donate money to debian goes like this:

* I think I'll donate to debian
* Ah here's the link
* ahh SPI
* ahh ahh read lots off stuff
* Hmmm different debian groups, who gets the money?
* hmm someone else to give my credit card number to

By this time what I'm doing involves comprehending more information and making more decisions that triggered the impulse to donate, so the result is "too complicated, can't be bothered"

Use paypal and empty it regularly into the real bank account.

Sam

Re:Endowment? -- donation link info

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.

Yeah, right.

probably will be modded down for this...

[twilight30]

... but his first actions as DPL make me wonder exactly just what the fuck Michlmayr had been doing for 2 consecutive terms.

It is refreshing to see someone trying to get to the bottom of the project's murkier depths.

(I'm writing this from Ubuntu's Hoary version, on a workstation computer at work. Nothing would please me more to go back to Debian soon.)

Blocking ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, I have also begun blocking slashdots ads

Error Correction: number of different platforms

[http]

You said,

"...and they run on more hardware than enybody else."

Much as I love debian, this is not true.
Debian: 10 CPU types, and two ports that "never took part in a Debian stable release".
NetBSD: 17 CPU types covering almost 50 hardware platforms (plus 6 experimental).

The only reason that I'm not running netBSD at the moment is because the installation process for my hardware is so convoluted, no, really, it's so convoluted, how can i put this? installing debian was possible on my machine back when I had no knowledge of linux and an unwillingness to ask for help. After five years of experience with various flavours of unix, linux and bsd, I lost two weekends in a row trying to get netBSD installed before coming to the realization that, though it could -run- on my hardware, it could not -install- on my hardware without the assistance of either a second machine or a special monitor, after which it should run just fine.

Re:Error Correction: number of different platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, see the difference is that debian has to have a consistent, working installer and no release critical bugs in any of the ~15,000 packages on any of its supported architectures before it can release.

Re:Error Correction: number of different platforms

[lahvak]

Much as I love debian, this is not true.
Debian: 10 CPU types, and two ports that "never took part in a Debian stable release".
NetBSD: 17 CPU types covering almost 50 hardware platforms (plus 6 experimental).

That's true. I was only counting linux distributions.

Re:Error Correction: number of different platforms

[http]

ouch! I stand corrected, my misunderstanding. put a jalepeno in my root beer.

MeatNurse Broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like something I read in one of the MeatNurse chapters.

parl

The Problem is GNU FiDdLed while Debian Burned

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the money. It's the license.

IIRC, the problem is with the docs (man, info, etc.). Many or most are now subject to the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL), which has been ruled to be "non-free" by the Debian folks. This means they may not be kept in a release which changes status (i.e., from Testing to Stable). Until they are replaced with freshly written docs, no change of status will occur. OTOH, they could revoke the modification to the Social Contract which requires free status to things which are not programs (docs, fonts, images, etc.). Some claim this modification was foisted on the community without due notification of what it would imply.

Note that even the Debian spiral image is restricted in such a way as to be classified as non-free.

IMHO, Debian has shot itself in the foot and if something isn't done soon, it may die of lead poisoning. This is especially problematic as so many fine distros are based on Debian. Loss of Debian would be bad enough, but loss of ALL of the others as well would be a disaster.

parl

circus and the bizarre

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad ESR's shit applies to this Open Source Debian crap. He he he

40k Let's see, that's about what we pay a first year programmer

Yeah, ESR was right. This IS the way to make serious money.

Whoopee

two pieces

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former NGO nerd using a pay-pal acount for internet donations rocks. Debian needs to get over itself. In the day it rocked, solid dynamic updates, somewhat usable etc. etc. etc. Now mind you I haven't done software dev. in ages, however I know FreeBSD has somthing akin to what Debians greping for ISO releases that are solid, also have the bleeding edge stuff taged one place etc. As many have noted They also are suffering from many things and if I were an investor saw the last major update was 3 years old. Nothing but some philosiphising what 'free' meens no way I'd stick around. gentoo has it right general platform releases to avoid HUGE compile hedaches. and stable as well as regular updates to the source. My message to Debian: Wake up get over it.

Damn if I had 40k on hand.

[/dev/trash]

I'd love to be THAT broke.

Re:Well ... (offtopic)

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'm fond of octave since Numerical Analysis II was taught using MatLab and familiarity = user-friendliness. I use Atlas to tune the NetLib BLAS and LAPack libs, which octave will also use. Maxima has become my Mathematica replacement. I especially like that I can insert Maxima statements into emacs .tex files, and have them evaluated and converted to latex in place. Gnumeric is my spreadsheet since it can export to .tex files suitable for \input(filename.tex}. And there is an R-gnumeric interface I'd like to play with to stimulate my learning of R. Since I've become an MBA student gretl (the GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) looks interesting and useful, and it also has an R interface. Our Chem dept runs MPQC on a linux cluster, and I keep almost doing work with the Prof whose baby that is. (When I was a Physics Grad student I hustled to get Computational Physics accepted as a viable research topic, unsucessfully..., but parallel methods for PDEs, and the dispersion equation, of all things, almost got some attention). NetLib has Parallel Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (PBLAS) that I'd like to try to install on the cluster. Debian has an r-cran-rmpi package (and our cluster and our chemists are MPI-centric, for sure!):

GNU R package interfacing MPI libraries for distributed computing
This CRAN package provides an interface to the MPI (Message-Passing Interface) API. It also provides an interactive R slave environment in which distributed statistical computing can be carried out.

PARI/GP was an interesting program that left me realizing how little math I really know. GAP - Groups, Algorithms, Programming - "a System for Computational Discrete Algebra", looks interesting, and yes there is a ParGap...it would be fun installing it if I could find someone here who'd care.

Endowments - Saving for a Rainy Day

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for endownments (and the apparent stockpiling of cash) is that this is the only means by which donations are not subject to disbursement quota (DQ) requirements.

For example (and overly simplistic one at that), in Canada (and excluding an application otherwise), a non-profit organization is required to spend a certain percentage of its donations each year, in order to maintain its regisration (and continue to be income tax exempt).