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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.
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...
>> "Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max)...."
:-)
dont do it Debian... its great to be able to apt-cache search and apt-get install almost anything. such a huge collection of available software that JUST WORKS is great. a little (or lot) longer release cycle doesnt really effect the bulk of users who just use "testing" anyway.
my 2 cents. Debian's base of huge packages, and apt are great assets. apt-get into it
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.
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
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.'"
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.
They can just remove all the packages i dont care about. That should reduce it to a manageable level.
---- Booth was a patriot ----