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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."
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.
Hmm, I noticed that the quote said "put to work for us." Perhaps he meant "for use?" That just sounded wrong.
Slant
Between the Spaces
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.
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.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
The people own it, it will never die. ;)
Debian>all
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.
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!
Foxed Design
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'?
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...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
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.
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?
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
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
Stable is a relative term. It isn't just "stable" vs. "testing", really. It is only valid relative to any one given distribution.
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.
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.
AccountKiller
Which of the Linux kernels are you using that hasn't had a security hole fixed in the previous year? Thanks.
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.
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).