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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.
The article did not say what packages were delayed specifically, but Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order. I'm not part of the project, just an appreciative user, but here are my two cents.
About the project being "frozen", I don't know about that. I have a laptop running etch-testing. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade in mid-Nov , put it away for a few weeks and ran it again in early-Dec (don't remember exact dates). Something like 70 packages needed upgrades.
But it's actually a fascinating case of unintended consequences -- hiring some full-time workers seems to have had precisely the opposite effective of the intended. It's a lesson worth considering before deciding that, say, what some third world country really, really needs is millions of laptops dumped on their children.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
I kid because I love. :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Now -that- is how to write an irritating alliterative headline! ^^
Funny isn't it, how no matter how many times humans start over with a utopian system, they end up concentrating their wealth into a small number of strong leaders and leaving a large number of impoverished citizens. We really are programmed to institutionalize.
open source is often made by paid developers, including major chunks of the Linux kernel. Open source just means you get the source code to modify or inspect, nothing to do with compensation or lack thereof.
The problem is that dunk-tanc.org really is splitting the community. What they're providing is valuable to some - and does indeed help some problems - but unfortunately it's counterproductive to others people's needs and wants.
You've now got a subset of Debian guys motivated by money, and the rest of them still motivated by making a quality Linux distribution. Sometimes those interests are aligned (as the guys who set up dunc-tank observed) but sometimes those interests are NOT (as the guys who started Caldera and Novell now see when Microsoft can easily use the motivated-by-money lever to change the course of the projects).
IMHO, Debian should stay Debian - and stay as far away from money and paid work as possible -- and let organziations like Ubuntu build the corporate bureacracy stuff like release schedules, support contracts, etc. I hope Ubuntu buys dunc-tank.org and takes those employees with them -- because they and their work are useful for corporate marketing -- but do more harm than good to Debian development.
Open Source can mean a lot of things, not just for the community. I'm sure it's not uncommon for someone to improve packages for themselves.
The problem with open source projects such as Debian is that they're volunteer and that people need to have continual interest in it in order for it to survive - with pay developers or no. That may sound like a obvious point, but it seems that more than a few open source projects are stagnating because of waning interest. NetBSD also comes to mind. What happens to Debian will be interesting not only because of Debian itself, but because the "waning interest" scenario will happen to many open source projects in the future that look perfectly healthy today. I guess I'd say it's a point of maturity we haven't really reached before.
An annoyingly alliterative announcement.
This email from October 26 is pretty darn informative when it comes to dunc-tank. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg 00260.html
6 /11/msg00004.html
/.ers just go straight to http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ and get the news. I certainly wish the editors at /. would.
This email from November 16 will pretty much bring everyone up to date on Etch status: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/200
Since its publication, Etch has gone into bug-fixing only.
Nice little bonus for debian users on the end if you read it all the way through.
Please, please
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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).
Bringing in managers, paying them, getting people on your back telling you what to do and when to do it, when you were doing this as a "hobby", is a bit erhm -- turning the hobby into a chore. You want a job done, on time, when you want it, sure. Pay for it.
Alliterative Article Appelation Aggravates Argumentative Arbiter of Arbitrary And Academic Article Arrangement
Welcome to the land of software development idiocy.
This is where you have a bunch of people on one side of the fence yelling that there is perfectly viable bussiness reasons to adopt open source... and on the other side of the fence you have even more people that wouldn't pay for surgery that could save their own life. (Since practically no one pays for anything open source, no one really makes much money from it.)
Then you get people that start out with open source projects, and then turn the project into a commercial venture... thereby ticking off everyone that helped for free because they wanted a free solution. I speak from experience here. I've been ticked off on occasion, after helping with a project that was then turned into a closed source program and sold as the main product for a company. What's that I hear??? Oh... You should sue... Give me a break. That would cost more money than I would get back, and with that, we've now reached the full circle of stupidity here.
By the way... I'm not angry or bitter about this... It happened a few years ago now. I'm just trying to make a point about the sometimes strange dynamics of large groups of people working on a software project. If you change a couple of minor details then you can easily apply the same kinds of arguments to closed source software too.
OMG! wait till M$ hears this. All they have to do is to donate some 1000$ to a few developers in each Open Source to project, and all other devlopers will quit because they are jelaous and these few will retire happily using those 1000$ or 2000$ handout. All Open Source projects will grind to a halt! Wow! That is Steve Ballmer's dream. He might actually sit on a chair or two now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Open Source is a development methodology. Free Software is a moral standpoint. Neither one says that you can't get paid. Neither one, in fact, says that you must do anything for the betterment of the community - once the appropriate license is used, EVERYTHING you do with the program that is legal contributes to the betterment of the community.
In fact what you and many other people miss is that no one does something for nothing. Sometimes they do it just because they are addicted to the good feeling that they get when they do something altruistic, but at the base level, they are feeding a stimulus-response pattern in their brain that causes them to want to do that. They are being paid in good feelings.
If I am contributing work for which many people get paid, and then I see that someone else is being paid for work which many others contribute, I may come to the realization that I need to pay my bills and they cannot be paid with good feelings which are unfortunately non-transferable and not considered legal tender for any but the most private of debts, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I'll just turn into a stingy bitch who wants some of that or y'all can fuck off. Either way, the contributions don't get made.
Ultimately, if you're going to have a release schedule and you plan to stick to it, you're going to either have to pay some people, or make sure some people don't need to get paid, which boils down to supporting those people, which is a form of pay even if you don't give them actual money. Otherwise you will have problems because people will have other motivations. This will continue until the cost of living drops so far through technology that people no longer have to work. Then we will have new problems.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hence the reason why fully community-based projects are not suited for mission-critical applications, unless you are willing to support your own use of it.
Some people are, so that kind of software is fine for them. Others are not, and so it is not. It's just that simple.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let me be crystal clear: THIS IS NOT TRUE!!
What is happening is the value of software is shifting. In the future, you won't have to work on open source software "in your spare time." You will be paid to work on open source software by the company you work for, because they have a stake in the software's success. Software is a living thing and must be maintained. If my business directly depends on... say... Asterisk running correctly, then I'd better have at least one OSS hacker who knows the Asterisk source code... get it?
Remember the old mantra: Free Software was never intended to be free-as-in-beer. You still have to pay for it if you want any real commercial use out of it. Companies will slowly realize they don't have to pay a monopolistic empire for all their software needs, but rather can hire their local blue-collar OSS hacker. Only then will the economy make some progress...
-dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I think you're talking about this:
and/or this:
The quotes in themselves aren't fully summing up the idea, but I didn't think it would be wise to cut and paste the whole chapter(s) in this post. The first quote is from the chapter "On Management and the Maginot Line" in tC&tB. The second quote comes from the chapter "Gift Outcompetes Exchange" in Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
Debian ships When It's Ready.
But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago, the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world. :-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.
The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project, but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend.
Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.
> Can complex software really be done in your spare time?
Yes.
The fact that many people *also* get paid to work on Free software is beside the point. You can write complex software in your spare time.
The interesting question is: how do we scale up development so that we can have large numbers of people working on the same code base, while they each only put in an hour or so a day? In the Free software world there are many examples of fantastically large teams that seem to create content without the problems you see in the average proprietary shop.
Some of these things have to do with the nature of Free software. For example: the ability to fork development any time that you want; the lack of need to get approval for work to begin; the ability to use evolutionary rather than planned process (i.e., any crackpot can implement a feature and the choice of whether or not to add it to the mainline can be made after the fact *without significant cost to the project*).
Yes, having a team of full time developers has some advantages. But it is far from impossible to write code with volunteers. And there are definite advantages to working in such an environment (I have done both in my career).
Having said all that, my preference is for Free software that is supported by full time programmers and for which I can buy a support contract. If it's mission critical software, I want a support contract and I want it to specify that the supporter will fix bugs that are stopping me from achieving my work (something which I've found difficult to find in the proprietary software world).
Failing that, I'll definitely take source code over vague promises that my problem might get fixed in a subsequent release if several other people seem to be having similar problems and the vendor is still in business...
Delays? A decidedly damnable development. Do I detect disagreement?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
I'm not so sure that this isn't happening already. Look at the small percentage of income that is spent in the US on basic needs. Look at the small percentage of us who actually make things.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
In fact what you and many other people miss is that no one does something for nothing. (...) They are being paid in good feelings.
Yes, but I don't think it's primarily the "I need to get paid" feeling which is tickled here. I think it's the feeling of fair. It's a very tricky feeling, and has nothing to do with technical or license issues. While there are paid developers which can be seen as a form of kickback by commercial distributions, the community itself is mostly built on common interest.
That common interest is like "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours", "we're all in this together pulling against the same goal", potluck dinner and so on. Once the focus shifts to attracting sponsors, it's every man for himself like if it was a beauty contest. Also I just had a horrible image of the swimsuit show, and now you do too. Anyway, the point is that it's not "why aren't I getting paid?" as much as "why should we be paid differently?"
For one you have the "It should have been me!" people, but there's also the "Now we're paying someone to do it" people. I must admit I'd have a pretty hard time motivating myself to do unpaid work to relieve someone who's getting paid. Even if I work 2hrs/week and you 40hrs/week, I have a pretty hard time accepting that you should be paid $X/hr and me $0/hr. Certainly, some people have "earned" it in my eyes, but if the feeling is "They're doing exactly the same as the rest of us, except they get paid" would you put up with that?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ideologically, I support Microsoft rather than Linux because Microsoft allows people like myself to make a living.
Until they want your revenue stream. Your going to be out of a job in Microsofts vision of the future:
Software factories: http://www.softwarefactories.com/
I wonder if the people at STAC, Netscape, etc. felt the same way as you do?
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
They can just remove all the packages i dont care about. That should reduce it to a manageable level.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else.
...development is currently frozen.
This is a gross exaggeration.
>
This is false. Etch (Testing) is frozen in that packages are no longer automatically moving into it from Sid (Unstable) but this is a normal part of the release cycle: it happens just before a release. Development continues apace in Sid.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well, actually, shelters that feed the poor and help battered women DO take donations to support the staff and the facility. Pretty much exactly what the folks paying the Debian guys were doing... put a little money in the pot so the facility can be open. So I'm afraid you came up with an example for the other side.
Money tends to throw a wrench into the works of an OSS project. I have seen it happen time and time again. GPL or BSD, it doesn't matter. At first people think its great, then something happens and the money is no longer there and, poof, suddenly the project is no longer able to support itself because people had become dependant on the cash flow. Or the core group decides to commercialize it (how many dozens of projects has that happened with? So many...) and work simply stops on the OSS version of the project, or people start arguing over where the money should go and who controls it, or it gets commecialized and the company then goes bust, or numerous other things.
Having source code available is no guarentee of continuance. What matters is who is doing the actual work. I don't recall a single instance where a previously uninvolved third party has ever been able to successfully fork a large open source project after the original authors broke up or went commercial. Forking comes from within... it almost has to for it to have any chance of succeeding.
For Debian this means that the resolution to the problem must also come from within. Either elements within the existing core group must fork the project, or they must work to resolve the mess the money has caused and become a cohesive entity again. No third party is going to bail them out.
Matthew Dillon
-Matt
They claim it's because they care about principle...in reality, what they really care about is retaining the ability to tell other people what to do and how to think.
Debian is one of the most flexible distributions availible. I don't give a rats arse about what some random Debian developer thinks about how I use my system or what programs I install because it doesn't affect me.
Personally I'd like to see Debian (as it currently exists organisationally) collapse entirely, and for the codebase to be adopted by Ubuntu, or other projects which will hopefully be run by people who are not so interested in dominating others.
How the hell is Debian collapsing going to help Ubuntu? Ubuntu already uses the Debian codebase. If anything Debian collapsing would hider Ubuntu. Your comment makes no sense.
IMO, this is a bad article. It's full of misinformation and factual errors, and it paints a very inaccurate picture of the current state of Debian.
From the article:
The date of Debian's first release given in this article is only one of the many factual errors that it contains. The Wikipedia article on Debian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian ) tells that "The Debian distribution was first announced on August 16, 1993 by Ian Murdock" and "The Debian Project grew slowly at first and released its first 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995." Debian version 1.1 was released in June 1996, version 1.2 in December 1996, and version 1.3 in June 1997.
Of course, the article also fails to mention that the Ubuntu distribution is based on Debian and Ubuntu's each new release relies heavily on the work that is constantly being done in Debian, and the article also fails to tell that Ubuntu takes most of the code it releases from Debian's development branch.
http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html
From the article:
Actually, there's no factual evidence at all that the delay in Debian's release schedule is caused by developers doing their work slower than usual. It is not easy to grasp how large and complex the Debian project has grown and many journalists also obviously fail to understand the not-for-profit and volunteer nature of the work that is done in Debian. The huge size of the project and the volunteer nature of its work are sufficient reasons alone to explain why the release has been delayed for a month or two. Such delays can happen for purely organizational reasons even if every developer is working as hard as they can.
Debian is a non-profit volunteer organization where all the important decisions are made democratically. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy ) This means that all important issues in the project management are openly discussed over a period of time and every developer has a chance to get their voice heard. From time to time there are disagreements among the developers and these disagreements are settled by voting where the opinion of the majority wins.
There was recently some disagreement among the Debian Developers about the experimental idea to fund two release managers' full-time work for a short period of time just before the upcoming Debian release. The Debian Developers voted about this issue and the majority of them decided to support the experiment. ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00019.html ) Most of the developers accepted this result but 17 of them have been protesting even after the results of the voting were published. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Debian has over one thousand officially accepted developers and many more who contribute to the project without having the official developer status. 17 developers out of 1000 is a small minority but they can still make a lot of noise. Those other developers concentrate on coding instead of public arguing, so it is only too easy for the scandal-hungry journalists to ignore all these hard-working silent developers and concentrate on the loud complainers.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00026.html