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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."
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.
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.
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.
They should save it up. At 2% interest, they'll double their money by the next release.
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?
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
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
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
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
Lucky bastard.
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