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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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.]

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:Umm, yeah...

[whiteranger99x]

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

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.

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.

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 ...

[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: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: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.

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.

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: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: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.

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: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.

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: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.