Ian Murdock: Debian "Missing a Big Opportunity"

Natester writes "While Debian struggles to get its next release (Etch) out the door, the project's founder, Ian Murdock, has spoken out about politics, the lack of firm leadership, and Ubuntu's meteoric rise in prominence. Murdock believes that Debian is "process run amok" — nobody feels empowered to make decisions, leading to the sluggish rate of progress."

Comments

Ian Murdock to join Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all,

It's being announced today that I'm joining Sun as chief operating
platforms officer, which basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's
operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux. I just posted the
announcement on my blog (http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/),
and it'll likely be making the rounds soon. Just wanted to
make sure you heard the news directly from me and to introduce myself.

First things first: I'm a long time Linux user, developer, and advocate.
I founded Debian in 1993, co-founded a Linux distribution company called
Progeny in 1999, and most recently served as CTO of the new Linux
Foundation, where I was (and still am) chair of the LSB, the Linux
platform interoperability standard. I'm also a long time Sun fan.

As for what I'll be doing: While I'm coming in with some fairly formed
opinions about what Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris ought to do (peruse my
blog a bit to learn more), I'm also a big believer in listening
before talking, and I have a lot of listening to do in the weeks
to come. So, please, feel free to drop me a line if you have
anything to tell me. And, please, be gentle while I get settled. :-)

Gotta get on a call in a few minutes. In the meantime, I just wanted
to say hello, and to make sure you heard the news directly from me.

Later,

-ian
--
Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com/

Re:Debian's problem

[lpcustom]

Yeah, that's one of the biggest draw to Debian for me. The release scheme is great. I can run stable on my server and it's exactly that....stable. It's older software but I'm not using it for a desktop, I'm running webservers, ftp, and the likes on it. All controlled via ssh. For this situation, stable is a great choice. On my desktop at home, unstable or testing is usually running the bleeding edge stuff and it does this with some good stability. I don't understand comments about the 'age' of Debian releases and comparing them to Fedora or some other bleeding edge distro. Some Distros are made for the desktop, others are better for a server....with Debian you have both and all it takes is to change the word "stable" to "unstable" in the sources.list file. I like that convenience.

The politics of the Debian development is sad to hear. It's always bad news. It's a shame because Debian is still a great distro. Even with all the internal conflicts, it's still my favorite distro.

Re:Ubuntu no better than Debian

[metamatic]

I think one opportunity that Debian continuously fails to see is to make very clear that Testing is always uptodate and always usable.

It isn't, though.

PAM in Testing was broken for months, and X in testing was broken for a while after the changeover to X.org. That's what led me to give up on Debian: 'stable' was too out-of-date, 'testing' was too unstable. By cherry-picking from 'testing', Ubuntu seems to be able to find a happy medium.