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Trouble on the Debian Front?
Linux.com is reporting that Matthew Garrett, one of the more active Debian developers, has called some ongoing problems with the Debian project into focus with his resignation. While he didn't hold any actual office, many prominent Debian developers described Garrett as "high profile". From the article: "In his own blog, Garrett relates his gradual discovery that Debian's free-for-all discussions were making him intensely irritable and unhappy with other members of the community. He contrasts Debian's organization with Ubuntu's more formal structure. In particular, he mentions Ubuntu's code of conduct, which is enforced on the distribution's mailing lists, suggesting that it 'helps a great deal in ensuring that discussions mostly remain technical.' He also approves of Ubuntu's more formal structure as 'a pretty explicit acknowledgment that not all developers are equal and some are possibly more worth listening to than others.' Then, in reference to Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and funder of Ubuntu, Garrett says, 'At the end of the day, having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases.'"
Especially when Ubuntu was released, everyone thought Debian was "dead" or "irrelevant", despite Ubuntu being based off Debian.
However, Debian's release cycle is picking up the pace, as Etch is set to be released soon (a quicker release cycle than Sarge's). Things are looking good as far as a mere user like me is concerned. There are a lot of hardworking people working on Debian, and the politicking is nothing new.
I disagree with this developer's comments, and suggest that perhaps his way of thinking is perhaps not suited to a meritocracy. Perhaps he needs an authority to appeal to in situations of disagreement.
"Meritocracy" means having authority - selected with skill in the field as the criterion (as opposed to connecitons, external resources, charisma or what have you). It means some people have more say than others based on their skill, not that there is no authority.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
Actually, that's representative democracy; true democracy would have no elections. Rather, every law would be voted on by everyone before it was enacted. That's the way it was in ancient Greece. Of course, there's a large difference between an ancient Greek city-state, where only male landowners can vote, and a continent-spanning nation with general suffrage - true democracy would result in chaos in most modern nations, especially with the number of laws we currently have (although I think that a lot of that is an outgrowth of having professional lawmakers). But still, the American system of representative democracy should not be used interchangeably with democracy; they are very different beasts.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hello,
I can see two problems with the way people are interpreting what happened.
The first one is that a lot of people are implying "One developer has left. Big deal. Somebody will step in". FALSE. A single, skilled developer can make the difference between a successful project and an unsuccessful one. As many good manages know, replacing a good worker is _very_ hard - sometimes impossible.
The second problem, is that a lot of people here have written comments without reading the mailing lists. Somebody implied "oh, it's the developer's fault, he shouldn't have been bothered in the first place". FALSE. Garrett really cares about the debian project; I generally agreed with what he said; lately, I was thinking "Geee, if I were him, I would quit". He found some of the tones grating as you guys would have if you cared about the project - and, above anything else, if you had read some of the messages in the mailing list. Accusatory. Unnecessary. Excruciating. Always coming from the "usual suspects" - who nobody seems to be able to shut up.
More and more people will leave, unless things change - rapidly.
Merc.
Editor In Chief
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/
The difference with FreeBSD is that it is a meritocracy. If you regularly contribute code, you will be invited to become a committer, and granted write access to the repository. The core team is then elected by the committers. You only get to vote if you are an active contributor, and the elected core team then sets policy. This helps to insulate the project from people who have a lot to say, but nothing helpful to contribute.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, because you'd have to be INSANE to use Ubuntu for E-mail, Firefox and 95% of what computers do for people, such office work, solitaire and software development.
You're full of it.
Ubuntu is fairly stable (I've had no package dependency problems, nor untoward crashes) and is actually up to date with some packages, rather than being 1-3 years out of date with everything but security patches. If you're a developer, you may want to use it simply because you get the latest standard libraries every six months, rather than every year or so (in a fast cycle). It has a lot more packages that do useful stuff. Important to me: Does Debian have the sun-java5 packages yet? Or will that be present in a year or two?
Ubuntu runs well and upgrades as gracefully as Debian. While you can be doubtful about putting it on your server (though so far I've felt it worked well), for workstations it's probably better, given that you get more updates, more recent software, and altogether more bang for your buck. Metaphorically.
Partly, but another problem is a small but vocal contingent in Debian who either don't understand its approximately-anarchistic nature, want to be rulers, or want to be ruled - and then create a ruckus when something happens that they don't like. I used to be a Debian developer, and I recognise all of the names in this article as being members of that contingent.
Fortunately, the Debian project has a history of being self-correcting. People like this tend to get frustrated and resign.
Hey, it's still working.
For the record, I quit for entirely different reasons, and some of my thoughts at the time on Debian's problems can be found here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/01/ms
Interesting, in light of some of the NetBSD issues posted by Charles... Maybe this is OSS evolution in action.
The real story behind Charles Hannums little rant has now been revealed - see the NetBSD-users mailing list. It turns out that Hannum had fucked up the day to day running of The NetBSD Foundation, to the point were it was not conforming to the regulations in Delaware where it was incorporated. Christos Zoulas and others sorted the mess out, but Hannum was totally uncooperative (the "fraudulent coup" crap that he was harping on about was him being ignored after being a jerk).
The Ubuntu community doesn't respect Debian? From what I hear about the "Fuck Ubuntu" t-shirts being worn at Debconf6, and the (verbal) attacks on DDs who also contribute to Ubuntu, I think the problem is exactly the opposite. :(