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Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."
Don't confuse debian with "The OSS Community". They are really not the same, and there is no such thing as "The OSS Community".
Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
Yeah, anyone who's ever gotten even remotely involved in wikipedia could have seen this one coming a mile away. This is why, at work, you have "project managers", that have final say (and yet, also take the burden and responsibility of making decisions).
Push Button, Receive Bacon
And that is a good thing. Linux is moving along at a great pace, even with the little spats here and there. I love that there is alot of different ideas, with people to push them through.
I posted this first to Mark's blog, but I'll repeat it here:
This is a very well-written summation of the issues.
To paraphrase a comment from a message board I visit, "[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone."
Debian provides a wonderful base for many other distributions, not just Ubuntu, and it is a rock-solid platform for servers. It runs on many different architectures, and can be used on machines from a handheld up to a massive server. This is one of its greatest strengths, but also one of its greatest weaknesses.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, is far more focused than Debian is. Starting with the general base (the plateau, as Mark called it), it builds a strong distribution targeted to only 3-4 architectures (counting SPARC), which opens many more options. This is no different than many other distributions have done. For example, Knoppix is another version of Debian with customizations on top of it for a specific platform (or platforms).
Ubuntu can't be everything to everyone, because everyone has different needs and goals, and Ubuntu has a specific focus. Similarly, Debian can't be everything to everyone, because it is a more general distribution, a jack of all trades (and master of none).
No such thing as an unresolvable conflict, there are only unresolvable egos
Project managers do a lot more than "review submitted code/content and decide whether it should be included in the production version of the product." They drive the process, not just filter it.
I would say that the line, "Ubuntu could not exist without Debian," is not an opinion. It is fact. Does this mean that Ubuntu owes anything to Debian? Not really. Other than the GPL obligations, there really isn't anything that Debian could or should ask for in return from Ubuntu.
Anybody who has worked with Debian already should have a deep and profound respect for the fact that Debian is plain and broad. When you sit down at a Debian computer, you are seated before a gateway to what might be the most customizable distribution in existence. All of the packages are roughly as far away as "$ sudo aptitude", and it is all but guaranteed that no matter how complicated or convoluted the package you want is, it will be downloaded and installed, along with dependencies, and you don't have to worry about a damn thing. (If you've ever compiled your own VLC or GIMP, you know what I'm talking about.)
The problem is that people would like to see specialization in Debian. Debian is not for specialization. It's for everybody to make what they want. Taking that away from Debian compromises the entire goal of the project...
~ C.
You take a straightforward, uncontroversial statement (Shuttleworth's blog entry) that practically everyone agrees with. Then you publish a headline saying there's a "conflict", and pretend there's a huge row going on.
Pretty soon you've got a heated argument going on, mostly between people who haven't read the statement that allegedly started it all.
What does it all prove? That Slashdot isn't "stuff that matters" any more, it's stuff that draws mass readership. Just what we were trying to get away from when we first started reading Slashdot ...