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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."
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.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
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
The submitter seems to be a little breathless.
/. 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.
/. article body. But why don't I just go ahead and quote from the IRC interview, which I still have in scrollback:
:)
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
3) People should read the internetnews.com article, also linked from the
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
Address-collecting spam robots don't know how to crack ROT13. Do you?
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.
-Lod
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