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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.
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.