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.

What do they need the money for?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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: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.

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.

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.