Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization

andremachado writes "Two academic management researchers, Siobhán O'Mahony and Fabrizion Ferraro, performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective. How did a big non-commercial non-paying community evolve to produce some of the most respectable Operating Systems and applications packages available? Organizations without a consensual basis of authority lack an important condition necessary for their survival. Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making — all of which can hasten their demise. The Debian Project community designed and evolved a solid governance system since 1993 able to establish shared conceptions of formal authority, leadership, and meritocracy, limited by defined democratic adaptive mechanisms."

Comments

PostgreSQL

[Anonymous Coward]

Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making â" all of which can hasten their demise.

Show me the PostgreSQL project's org chart. Show me the evidence that the project is not kicking ass.

Re:Just an observation

[FauxPasIII]

> Ubuntu is 10x better than Debian

Ubuntu IS Debian, for all intents and purposes. They take the excellent work that Debian publishes, do some additional (and IMO also excellent) work to refine it, and republish that as Ubuntu.

I'm completely outside of the Debian and Ubuntu communities, but I suspect strongly that Debian re-imports some of the Ubuntu refinements into their own project, as well.

Ain't FOSS grand?

Re:Just an observation

[Nursie]

Once it's installed and running then there are a lot of similarities. OTOH the distinguishing features are often ease of installation and upgrade, whether or not you can use it in a live CD way, supported platforms (I 3 debian for it's ARM support), size of install (DSL/nDSL is great for a bootable USB stick ) etc etc etc

But yeah, essentially, one desktop linux is usually much the same as another.

Re:Some, but not all.

[leoboiko]

To be fair, I think debian's dash package prompted you to link /bin/sh to it since before Ubuntu came around. It's true that it wasn't the default, though; you had to manually install dash and explicitly select "yes" in the debconf dialogue.

Re:Some, but not all.

[BlackCreek]

But a simple example: Debian, for the longest time, had /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash, although they did have a rule that any script requiring /bin/sh should only use POSIX syntax, and not bash-isms. Sometime in 2006, I think, Ubuntu switched /bin/sh to /bin/dash. Dash is much faster than Bash -- so much so that this switch is the main reason that version of Ubuntu booted so much faster than previous versions (it was also when Upstart was first integrated, though Upstart is barely used)... And since then, certainly, fixes to various packages' scripts which claim #!/bin/sh, but really want bash, have been sent back to Debian. (Either POSIX-ify them, or make them explicitly ask for bash.) If your shell script is not POSIX /bin/sh, don't mark it as a POSIX /bin/sh script. Is that difficult?

FWIW The trick to use dash as /bin/sh was well known by loads of Debian users back in the day when it was still called "ash". It did wonders to the boot time of my old ole PentiumII.

FWIW 2 The first people to actually make the choice of setting dash as /bin/sh, were the Nokia folks that released the N770 internet tablet that runs a Debian based system.

The use of it in N770 lead to loads of scripts being made clean of bashisms. But now with the popularity of Ubuntu, many, many people are forcing "#!/bin/bash" down everyones throats even in cases when it is not necessary.

As fas as I can tell, the reason for it is the good & old NIH complex from which so many GNU fans seem to suffer from. But I could be in wrong on that (but not that much :-P).

In any case, currently "grep bin/bash /etc/init.d/* | wc -l" gives me a count of 5. Why? I mean why on the scripts I use to boot? Five stupid unnecessary reasons for my computer to boot slower, and to force me to have bash installed no matter what. I mean, what harm can it cause to add (truly) unnecessary bloat to a critical part of the system?

Perhaps I am being picky. But IMHO that goes so deeply against what *I* would call "good software engineering" that it really annoys me.