Slashdot Mirror
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."
it was an anarcho-syndicalist commune, where they take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I for one welcome our debian ... nevermind.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Show me the PostgreSQL project's org chart. Show me the evidence that the project is not kicking ass.
Debian is essentially the same as Ubuntu. But if you know your way around Linux, every distro is essentially the same.
> 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?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
So that explains the polka startup sounds....
My blog
That sure in heck sounds like something the government would put out.
Except for the meritocracy part, that implies the people in charge have some sort of qualification for being in charge.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The site has been slashdotted apparently but no fear, it does not contain anything useful information about the research anyways. You could download the original draft submitted to the journal at http://www.business.ualberta.ca/tcc/documents/TII_3_OMahoney_Ferraro_final.pdf
[quote]
The following is the quote from google's cached version:
Scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization
André Felipe Machado
TerÃa-Feira, 27 de Novembro de 2007
Two academic management researchers performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective.
The study analyzed 13 years of Debian Project history, interviewed some Project participants and previous Leaders, and carefully observed patterns.
The open nature of history, registered at discussion lists archives and irc logs, meetings reports, helped a lot during the data collection phase.
The study is VERY interesting as scientific analyzed HOW an open source project survived, evolved and flourished during 13 years, overcoming many troubles only challenged by long term BIG communities, reaching a solid institutional foundations to resolve disputes.
The previously releasead version of the text can be found here.
The latest revised version, published at the Academy of Management Journal, Oct 2007, Vol. 50 Issue 5, p1079-1106, 28p; (AN 27169153), is copyrighted and can not be published here.
The authors are SiobhÃn O'Mahony , Assistant Professor at the University of California's Graduate School of Management, and Fabrizio Ferraro , General Management Professor at IESE
Versão para impressão
Baixar PDF Baixar a versão PDF desta pÃgina
[/quote]
Debian doesn't seem to mind Ubuntu, for the most part, except when Ubuntu users come to Debian forums asking for help.
/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)...
/bin/sh linked to dash -- some of Amazon's EC2 tools, designed to work on Fedora, need to be patched before they can work on Ubuntu, for that very reason.
But a simple example: Debian, for the longest time, had
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.) But as far as I know, no major distributions outside Ubuntu actually have
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ubuntu in many ways lit a fire underneath Debian. I liked Debian in 2002; by 2004 I was getting a bit tired of stupid jokes about being out of date, and I was tired of running development versions just to get a modern desktop. For example, the last version of xfree was finally released around the same time most distros were shipping the new and shiny xorg project x server. So when Ubuntu came around, that was great. They brought in some X guys to hammer Xorg into a working package, at great personal sacrifice. They made a push for Default debconf priority, to large success. They adopted a LiveCD approach while Debian was adamantly fighting Knoppix. They had a Code of Conduct that laid out some important ground rules that Debian was missing and refused to find. The brought a focus on the desktop that I felt Debian was lacking. And they had a commitment to releasing frequently. Six month releases is a step back from someone like me who used to run Debian unstable, but I was getting tired of random kernel pushes breaking video drivers and the like.
Don't get me wrong; Debian testing is probably great for lots of people. If Ubuntu's trajectory continues as it is, I may one day return to Debian; as a result of Ubuntu's successes, they've adopted a number of Ubuntu's practices and policies. For example, they've adopted a wiki for community development, and a new proposal system for evaluating large scale decisions. And meanwhile, Canonical's success with Ubuntu has it focusing on strange contracts that draw resources from fixing bugs related to my personal uses.
As for your comparison essay, the "ubuntu-desktop" meta package now suggests / recommends most things, and apt is set to bring them in on updates but not remove the meta package if they're removed. That way, they can bring in new features, and you can opt out of some of them, and it'll remember that. The bloat charge is a bit unfair. The default install is something usable out of the box. You're free to do the minimal install the same way you did with Debian, but disk space is cheap these days, and people only have so many hours in a day. Hating release schedules is a bit silly. One way you update everything at once, and the other the updates trickle down to you. The everything at once has the advantage that you can deploy new compilers / libc during the early fork without worrying that someone will accidentally screw themselves. Of course the downside is that pidgin may be outdated quickly, but I think it's been fairly lucky at not breaking network compatibility recently.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin