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Debian Delayed by Disenchanted Developers
Torus Kas writes "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 was supposed to be due by December 4 and development is currently frozen. Apparently the saga was triggered by disenchantment towards funding of $6,000 for each of the 2 release managers to work full-time in order to speed up the development. Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else."
The development is NOT frozen. The Packages going into Etch are frozen, meaning that the current versions will get into etch with all the necessary bugfixes. development is on full steam.
i've been running debian/etch(testing) for ages. the whole freeze thing doesn't matter to me.
i don't know what everyone else has their apt sources pointed at, but the rate of updates haven't changed any that i can see.
take your time, make it stable.
then i'll switch to what ever the next one is.
Don't be so anal and patch-happy with mainstream packages. Big projects like Gnome and KDE already do extensive testing upstream.
You sure about that? I've read recently from an upstream Gnome developer that GTK lacks maintainers ( http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2006/12/20/0 ), Etch will ship Gnome 2.14 because of unresolved GTK bugs, so what you're saying seems quite wrong...
There comes a point where working on open-source software can no longer be a hobby done in spare time. I would think that lots of open-source coders reach this point. Then either you find a company to pay you (e.g., Redhat), or you stop doing it. Software is getting more and more complex requiring more lines of code and more development. Unless one is rich and is doing it for a hobby, people need to get paid for their 8+ hours of work a day. Can complex software really be done in your spare time?
Ideologically, I support Microsoft rather than Linux because Microsoft allows people like myself to make a living. Granted lots of people do get paid to work all day on an open-source project...companies wouldn't do this unless it gave them a competitive advantage (i.e., Redhat can sell an OS by leveraging the work of others).