Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Now that we have bittorrent they can drop the ISO mirror farm.
40 thousand dollar?! This is what Texas Holdem's all about!!
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?"
When asked what he would do if someone donated a million dollars, Branden Robinson promptly responded, "two chicks at the same time man!"
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).
Ignore the rantings above. Poster is an idiot.
Finish Sarge!
Yeah and when that happens, I'll bet you that the McDonalds 29 cent hamburger will cost $290,000 :P
Join the TWIT army now!
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. ;)
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.
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.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
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.
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.
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.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
They should save it up. At 2% interest, they'll double their money by the next release.
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 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?
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.
$210K profit. They made $4.1mil.
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
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
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)
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
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
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
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).
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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
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.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
blog.sam.liddicott.com
"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.
Lucky bastard.
Best Slashdot Co
Because noone likes lukewarm cans of shut the @$@@ up. They're supposed to be served warm.
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.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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.
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.