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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.'"
It's kinda interesting, the last comment regarding having a single individual who's word is basically law in a project. It's worked for the Linux kernel, and the longest surviving Linux distribution (Slackware).
I was never a fan of the political backend of Debian, but I recognize the developers' contributions to the distribution. Maybe now that Ubuntu is popular and succeeding, a change in the way politics are done at Debian is on the horizon?
NetBSD is dying
What you have here is someone who has taken an either/or position on formal structure. This is a fallacy that is refuted every single time it is used. 'You're either with us or against us', 'Emacs, not vi', and 'cathedral, not bazaar'.
What is necessary is not a central bureaucracy that keeps people in line. Nor is it absolute freedom that allows any idiot to speak with equal stature of someone with multiple credentials. There are no hard and set rules that will make one project more successful or attractive than another. The best you can do is to take care of the community members that are productive and useful and try to avoid those members who are more prone to religious wars than code reviews.
The thing is, even with rules in place, mailing-lists always end up being a place for megaphone diplomacy, he who shouts loudest and longest (even if they have no clue) wins.
;-)
The lists end up being political flamefests so anyone of actual consequence (ie: folks that do the work) will just depart the list to use IM/IRC/private email so as to avoid the bullshit and get on with work.
Maybe to avoid this projects should use Slash instead of mailing lists, at least the smack-tards could be moderated out of existence
Put a group of alpha geeks in a room and start a discussion. Inevitably, they spend more time trying to prove to each other who is the smartest than they do actually pushing forward the discussion. Why is that?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's also worked for Apple's OS X, which claims to be the most widely distributed desktop version of *nix ever.
I tend to agree that there needs to be somebody to make final decisions on matters of wide questionability. Just the other day I compiled an app on Ubuntu and moved it to RHEL3 only to find that the static libraries were in a different location. I praised Apple's build system as well as the efforts of LSB and gave up on my quest to run hacked code on RHEL3 since I'm nowhere near a guru developer. (The app compiled and ran flawlesly on OS X and Ubuntu using debian packages.)
Lack of leaders is not the same thing as a lack of rules
It's not the same but you'll quickly find out how you emulate "authority" with your set of rules sooner or later, effectively ending up with leaders.
It's the natural way. We all want to be leaders, or be equal, and that's ok, because it means there's a competition and possibility of change for the better. But if there's no concentration or "strategy" in a system, what results is a mess.
Every system needs just about the right amount of "chaos" and "order" for it to thrive. Even democracy has elections once a few years, no every day or every hour.
In work environments Debian rocks. Ubuntu is... not for work, it is a windows replacement. What else can I say?
It really depends on what you mean by work, doesn't it? I mean, what does "work" mean to you, and why would it describe any work that could possibly be done?
My work is computer science research, and Ubuntu is perfect for that. It just sets itself up (on both my laptop and lab desktop) and gets out of my way. The development libraries are all there when I need them. This is as opposed to Windows, where I'd have to hunt for and/or pay for libraries or IDEs I want (been there, done that, never again), or Debian, where I'd have to spend a lot longer getting the software to talk to the hardware.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
i feel like a traitor, but should i at least look at ubuntu?
That depends on what you want to do. If you want to play games with accelerated graphics or watch YouTube or other flash stuff, you need Ubuntu's non free goodies. If you want a sane place to put your email, web research and 95% of what computers do for people, you want Debian's free goodness. Debian runs well and upgrades gracefully. A simple rule might be: Stable on the server, Testing on your desktop, Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, etc on your toybox. If playing with the software itself is your thing, go for Sid. Give the people what they want. That includes yourself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think of Debian and K/ubuntu as akin to BSD and OS X. One is just the other with a cool GUI.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Without Debian, where would we have the amazing, huge codebase for every Ubuntu, Jibbajabba, or Lilixinidros distribution out there?
No one is questioning the contribution Debian developers have made to the Linux ecosystem as a whole. The question is, is Debian able to do anything groundbreaking on its own anymore? If someone were to try to move to a new init system in Debian, how long would it take to actually get done?
Personally, I think Debian should embrace its role as a distribution that others derive from. It is doing an excellent job in that respect, and I don't think the current organizational structure of the project could allow it to function as anything else in a more effective way. If some of the developers would stop antagonizing Ubuntu and embrace it instead, I think we'd all be better off.
What's wrong with having Debian be the technology proving ground while Ubuntu builds stable desktop operating systems for average people?
What are the odds that all those Debian developers will wake up one day and decide to work for Ubuntu instead? Clearly, many of them are bitter that Ubuntu is stealing their thunder. It's doubtful that Debian developers will abandon ship anytime soon for Ubuntu. It's also doubtful that Ubuntu will get the huge numbers of developers needed to compete with RedHat anytime soon. For at least the near future, Ubuntu requires Debian to thrive.
As for me, I trust Debian's open style of development to never be corrupted by any single person. It's amazing growth and activity is a tribute to the spirit of the open-source community. Sure, there's no all-powerful leader who can make things happen quickly. But then again, that can be a good thing. It's kind of like the US vs European Union.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
i just use google when i need something, and then find it in dselect.
I think, as a continuous debian user (not developer, but I read through the occassional debian "discussions") since the very beginning, FWTFW, that the recent crowing about a better "graphical installer" as being so damned important is reflective of the frustration many longtime users and developers feel with the current debian anarpolitical process. The fact that the majority of a gaggle thinks blinking lights are the important part of a system does not make it so. Form must follow function, or we end up with Windows quality, where an evolutionary process of continuous improvement is interrupted by those that love the blinking lights, because they are the ones buying the product - in the free software world, for many years the "buyer" of the product was the developers themselves - anyone else was free to use it if they found it useful, not blinking light pretty, or not as they chose - trying to attract the unwashed masses is antithetical to success. In an evolutionary process that which works is that which succeeds. "Success" is where the defintion needs to be set - if it's defined as that which gets the most Windows weenies to switch, then you're going to get a different group of people drawn to the process than if it's defined as that which absolutely insists on quality and stability and fit and function and continuous improvement. The latter is an evolutionary process that results in systems good enough to go to the stars.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Er... well, yes. I hate to compare Shuttleworth, who I respect greatly, to GW, who makes me wish I were Canadian. I doubt Debian would like to be compared to the EU, but that's kind of where I was going.
As I grow older (I'm 42), and gain more experience, one thing I've come to appreciate is the impact of strong individual leaders. Linus for Linux, Shuttleworth for Ubuntu, Regan for the Republicans, etc. When it's important to get things done quickly, there's no substitute for a strong leader.
The downside is you can't always trust a strong leader. I'm stuck with GW running (and ruining) the US. I would never trust our free OS, or our democratic government to a single individual. Let Debian insure software freedom, and let Ubuntu lead the charge against Windows.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
It's organized using the pyramid-power design. --That is, one all powerful individual at the top, and then cascading levels of management beneath. This is, of course, the standard model for most large organizations in the world, including business, military, government, religion, etc.
The problem is that such systems lend themselves to easy corruption by the forces of greed and self-service.
There is an alternative system for organizing, and it uses a cell-based power distribution system with no one individual at the top and no downward cascading power structure. Organic systems throughout the biosphere use the cell-based method of organization to great effect. --And many open source projects seem to work this way as well.
One of the noteworthy factors about Cell-Based systems is that they are far less easily corrupted by greed and self-serving individuals because everybody has the power to call attention to all manner of problems without the threat of recrimination or dismissal; without having their complaints arbitrarily over-turned by individuals who might be driven by ego and emotional concerns. Psychopaths are well suited to successfully infesting and rising through the ranks of pyramidally based power structures, because they are drawn to power. But when power is evenly distributed as it is in Cell-Based structures, where are they drawn to? --And how much more easily are problem individuals such as the psychpathic or sociopathic personality noticed and weeded out?
--It seems to me that the idea of being of non-self-service, but rather other-serving in orientation, (no multi-million dollar salaries for CEO's), is directly related to an entire pattern of thinking and awareness, part of which is intrinsically linked to the decisions for how the power and 'command' structure of the organization is laid out, either Cell-Based, or Pyramidal.
I think it serves well to be attentive of these two patterns and how they affect our world.
-FL