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Debian GNU is Not Unix

Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL 126

Posted by timothy from the clean-sweep dept.
Strike writes "The votes for the new Debian Project Leader are in and the tallying is over, results here. Martin Michlmayr comes out on top, winning 4-0 going head to head against the other three candidates (with the fourth win being over "no candidate"). Last year's DPL Bdale Garbee came in 2nd, with Branden Robinson and Moshe Zadka coming in 3rd and 4th. Michlmayr's platform can be seen here."
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Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL More

Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL

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  • Outcome (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @01:38AM (#5625026) Homepage Journal
    The winner of the election is Martin Michlmayr.

    I would like to thank Moshe Zadka, Branden Robinson and Bdale Garbee for their service to the project, for standing for the post of project leader, and for offering the developers a strong and viable group of candidates.

    Total unique votes cast: 488, which is 58.60409% of all possible votes.

    Pairwise elections won-lost-tied: Moshe Zadka 1-3-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 428

    Bdale Garbee 3-1-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 228

    Branden Robinson 2-2-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 238

    Martin Michlmayr 4-0-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 226

    None Of The Above 0-4-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 449



    1 beats 5: 228 202 = 26
    2 beats 1: 428 34 = 394
    2 beats 3: 238 221 = 17
    2 beats 5: 449 29 = 420
    3 beats 1: 385 66 = 319
    3 beats 5: 405 65 = 340
    4 beats 1: 397 38 = 359
    4 beats 2: 228 224 = 4
    4 beats 3: 237 226 = 11
    4 beats 5: 424 39 = 385

  • debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:5, Interesting)

    by absurdhero ( 614828 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @01:41AM (#5625031) Homepage
    This guy has an interesting and in depth platform. I wish our real world politicians would go at it with this kind of vigor and detail. He is well educated and has been working actively within Debian for the past few years and has real purpose and usefuleness. I wish i could say the same about bureaucrats.

    • Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:4, Interesting)

      by $carab ( 464226 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @01:52AM (#5625076) Journal
      Maybe I'm just being stupid, but I think the pairwise system of voting for national elections would be pretty cool. Completely infeasible, of course, but still cool.

      I imagine the 2000 Presidential candidates would be:
      GW Bush
      Al Gore
      Pat Buchanan
      Ralph Nader
      No One

      It would require each voter casting 4+3+2+1=10 votes, so of course it wouldn't happen, but I imagine that the "No one" option would probably finish very strongly, perhaps even winning the election. (I think Scott Adams discussed that if one of the major parties nominated a bag of lettuce, it would capture 40% of the popular vote because it "has good character").

      Where this sort of voting might actually useful (if voters wouldn't mind) would be in primaries, where definitive preferences for certain candidates would be shown, and other candidates would find out if their campaign will go anywhere much faster....maybe. Then again, this would require voters being well informed about each candidate, and we all know that isnt gonna happen.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Immediately I'm thinking of politicians having heart attacks because well coordinated media blitzes are no longer functional! This would be awesome but definately perturbing to the general populace.
        • > I've proposed before, as well as now, a "none of the above" option.

          The 1985 comedy, "Brewster's Millions" took this idea to its peak, when a wacky millionaire determined to lose all his money starts an ad capaign asking for people to vote for "none of the above" :)

      • 10 votes? No, I don't think so. You would simply rank canidates, 1 through 5. In the pairwise comparisons, you simply look at who is ranked higher. And I highly doubt that "no one" would win, given how few write ins are cast in any election.

        Australia uses a system not dissimilar, whereby people rank their choices in canidates. Everyone's first place choices are examined, and the canidate with the fewest 1st place choices is eliminated. Those that voted for the least popular canidate have their votes

      • Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        We just talked about this in history class! This was already tried in renaissance Italy. It does not work, because people are selfish. They will try to maximize their influence by not voting fairly. For example, someone who supports Bush would be best off putting Bush first and Gore last even if Gore is their second choice. By putting Gore last, they help Bush by giving the expected second place candidate less votes.

        • We just talked about this in history class! This was already tried in renaissance Italy. It does not work, because people are selfish. They will try to maximize their influence by not voting fairly.

          Actually, the Condorcet method used by the Debian project is pretty much immune from manipulation, in contrast to our current system which *strongly* discourages people from voting "honestly" if their preferred candidate isn't one of tha major parties.

          The Condorcet method is less than 100 years old, and the

    • You clearly haven't tried reading one of the platforms chosen by the Democrats [democrats.org], the Republicans [rnc.org], the Reform Party, the Greens [greenparty.org], the Libertarians [lp.org], or any of the dozen other groups that run national candidates.

      These are not trivial documents, and they're chosen at the same time as the party's official candidate (at the national convention). The candidates themselves also publish volumes of press releases and opinion papers. These papers might not be quite as pleasant the DPL platforms, but they cover more mat
  • of an incomprehensible voting system. Now all that remains for Martin Michlmayr is to -
    1. Destroy the Debian budget by not cashing donation checks from the wealthiest donors
    2. Hire a press agent who can say "GNU/Linux" with a straight face
    3. Imprison without accusation developers on those suspicious BSD-licensed projects
    4. Declare war on Red Hat (damn commies!)
    • Dispite being a "Red" hat, I believe Debian would be the communists, while Red Hat would be the capitalists.

    • Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DarkVein ( 5418 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @07:55AM (#5625779) Journal

      I'm pretty sure you're being facetious, but I'll bite, For Educational Purposes. :)

      France had an interesting problem, before a popular political reform. They had 7+ candidates in one presidential election, most likeable, with a few unpleasant and one racist downright-unlikable person. France, at this time, used the same voting system we do, called plurality voting [wikipedia.org]. I bet you can guess who won. Of all the voting systems known, plurality is the most likely to give a false representation of voter preference. France no longer uses plurality voting in presidential elections, though they don't use Condorcet's Method either.

      Debian uses Condorcet's Method [wikipedia.org]. In this method, voters rank all candidates in their order of preference, and candidates can even tie for nth place on the ballot. The system considers which candidate is prefered over whom, and not their actual "rank" on the ballot. That is, if you tied four candidates for first place, and a fifth candidate for second place, you are only voicing that you prefer any of those four over the fifth candidate.

      The election is resolved by running every candidate against every other candidate. That means, given n candidates, (n^2)-n "pair-wise" elections are held. Given 5 candidates, 20 elections. Given 8 candidates, 56 elections. Think of it this way: Given Bush or Gore, who would you pick? Given Bush or Perot, who would you pick? Given Bush or Sharpton, who would you pick? There can be multiple ways to chose the winner of the election. The candidate with the most victories is considered the winner. The candidate with the fewest losses is considered the least disliked. Most of the time, there is not a tie, and these two are the same candidate.

      Tallying the votes is a little more obtuse. The easiest way to manually tally the votes uses a grid. From top the bottom and left to right, list the candidates. The rows will be the runners, and the columns will be the opponents. Going left to right, top to bottom, mark each box where the runner was prefered to the opponent. If they were tied, do not mark the box. Do this for each ballot. You will then add the grids resulting from each ballot. Consider each mark a '1', and each unmarked box a '0'. The result is the "Sum Grid".

      From the "Sum Grid", you can draw a number of conclusions. Each grid shows the number of voters that prefer the runner to the opponent. Compare the runner's votes to the opponent's votes. The runner with the most victories can be considered the most popular. When there's a tie for first place, the candidate with the least losses could be considered a good choice--the least disliked. You could also add the numbers from each row for an indescriminate popularity vote. The popularity choice doesn't draw any useful conclusions, and can be any candidate except the one with the most losses. There are other possibilities. Condorcet's largest problem is resolving ties for first place.

      "None" could be an option.

      • slight clarification (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Trepidity ( 597 )
        In standard Condorcet, the only clear winner is one who wins every single pairwise election, not just the one with the most victories. That is, he is preferred to every other candidate, so there is no way you could argue that another candidate would be better suited for the job.

        While having the most victories is a possible gauge, one major problem (among others) is that it doesn't weigh victories by importance. For example, if Bush is preferred to 12 minor candidates, and Gore is preferred only to Bush a
        • While having the most victories is a possible gauge, ...

          Yup, there's actually a name for that: Copeland's method [wikipedia.org]. Not nearly as well known as Condorcet's, but is nice in that the tiebreaker is more intuitive to those that are used to sports matchups.

          Rob Lanphier
          (who is looking for an excuse to plug Electorama [electorama.com], a site about electoral reform)

        • While having the most victories is a possible gauge, one major problem (among others) is that it doesn't weigh victories by importance. For example, if Bush is preferred to 12 minor candidates, and Gore is preferred only to Bush and Buchanan, Bush wins, because he has 12 victories versus 2, which is clearly not good.

          But you're then making the assumption that Gore is somehow inherently "better" than the 12 minor party guys for some reason. Why is the Gore victory "more important"? Why are the terms "Democ

      • </facetious> Thanks! That's a lot clearer than the Debian page.
      • Given 8 candidates, 56 elections. Think of it this way:
        Given Bush or Gore, who would you pick?
        Gore.
        Given Bush or Perot, who would you pick?
        Perot.
        Given Bush or Sharpton, who would you pick?
        Sharpton.

        ..Get the drift yet? I don't think running all 56 elections will be necessary.

  • Come on were geeks (Score:5, Funny)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @01:48AM (#5625056) Journal
    enum DPL {Martin_Michlmayr =1, Branden_Robinson,Moshe_Zadka }

    DPL result;

    result =rand(time(0)) % 4;

    This is how it should work.

    • shit

      correction

      result = rand(time(0)) % 3 + 1;

      I forget there were 3 not 4 candidates and since the enumurator started at 1 then I would need to add 1 to prevent the results from being off by 1.

      • Re:Come on were geeks (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @04:53AM (#5625449) Homepage
        Now, that is a needless mistake you opened your code up to. You could have easily avoided it by taking the (admittedly rather weak) help the compiler can offer you. Simply add a "sentry" value to the enumeration, that holds the number of distinct values. This is simple and "natural" when you start indexing at zero, not at one like you did. Code:

        enum DPL { Martin_Michlmayr = 0, Branden_Robinson, Moshe_Zadka, DPL_CANDIDATES };

        DPL result = rand(time(NULL)) % DPL_CANDIDATES;

         Note how I do not explicitly assign a "proper" value to the DPL_CANDIDATES sentry value, that is the point since now the compiler automatically assigns the correct value. The initial =0 assignment is optional, but nice for extreme clarity IMO. As you can see, this also removes the need to add 1 to the result, since the modulo operator will now work as intended. Um. Apologies of course if you already knew all this, I just felt like geeking out a bit. :)
    • Were geeks? This would be the new breed of human that changes into a geek during a full moon, then.

  • How did he REALLY win? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rumbler ( 598245 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @01:52AM (#5625074)
    "...Moshe's intention is to do nothing at all..."

    "...Bdale speaks of communication... community at large was not well informed at all of what was going on..."

    "...I didn't see many new thoughts in Branden's platform...he has had (pointless) arguments with virtually anyone in the project who is doing important stuff...I doubt he would be an effective leader..."

    The true secret to success... clever condescending trash talking.

  • Recount!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by solman ( 121604 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:07AM (#5625112)
    He won by four votes and there were 23 spoiled ballots. Shouldn't somebody be looking for chads or something in the digital signatures?

  • percent (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Total unique votes cast: 488, which is 58.60409% of all possible votes.

    Not unless fractional votes are allowed.

    • He must be using one of those original pentiums to calculate his numbers eh?

    • Let's see this simple ficticious scenario:

      3 possible votes.
      2 votes were cast.
      2/3 = 33.3333333%

      Conclusion: WTF? Which moron cast the fractional vote?

      Go back to school and pay attention in class this time.

      Cheers,
      e.

      • Go back to school and pay attention in class this time.

        You miss the point entirely, edinho sweetie. But don't you worry your pretty little head; I will explain it to you. 488 is not 58.60409% of any integer. So unless fractional votes are allowed, 488 cannot be 58.60409% of the total.

  • A choice of lesser evils? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm reading this guy's platform, and honestly having trouble figuring out why he won. He seems to go on and on about his experience, but everything he says about his actual plans seems kind of vague and disjointed, about the only concrete proposal he makes is to get rid of orphaned packages and inactive maintainers.

    So it seems like the main reason he won would have to be disillusionment with the other candidates. With Bdale being the incumbent and responsible for whatever has seemingly gone wrong over th
    • While reading the platform I came across a few more things that he does mention he would like to do:
      - He says Debian needs leadership and coordination, this is where he sees his main role. IMHO something that sounds good to me
      - He wants to find a solution to the release cycle problem
      - In fact, most of the issues he lists are of organizational value and are less technical, maybe that's why you seemed to have overlooked them?

      I have to agree though that he does spend a great deal of time talking about his per

  • Neato Keen (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by blitzoid ( 618964 )
    I'm glad to see free software projects being managed so well, with organized heirachies and the like.

    I personally prefer Gentoo over Debian, but Debian is still a damn solid distro and I hope they continue to do well.

  • IN SOVIET DEBIAN (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:09AM (#5625255) Homepage
    Martin Michlmayr wins the election by a 99.9% margin, his opponents misteriously disappear and martial law is declared.

    *ducks*

  • Sad (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It saddens me to no end to see how Martin won the election. If you just ignore Moshe and remove the "None of the above option", which was beaten by all candidates, the results are:

    2 beats 3: 238 221 = 17
    4 beats 2: 228 224 = 4
    4 beats 3: 237 226 = 11

    which translated to English means that Bdale won over Branden by 17 votes and Martin won over Bdale by 4 votes and over Branden by 11. That's *fscking* close for this kind of voting system.

    Bar Moshe, Martin is probably the worst DPL candidat
    • Bdale is a very smart guy, and has been a good leader - but he has tended to stay out of the limelight, which maybe hasn't helped him in the eye of the 'electorate'.

      Hopefully, Martin will do some visible leadership, leading to real accomplishments, and not just be an "evil catbert";-)

  • Stuffing the ballot box... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Embedded Geek ( 532893 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:49AM (#5625323) Homepage
    <tongue firmly planted in cheek>
    Let's see if I have this straight:
    1) Leaders for open source projects are elected.
    2) The election is held electronically.
    3) The server recieving and tallying those votes is running open source software.
    4) Thus, the firewalls, auditing utilies, and other security measures on that server are possibly written by the very same people who are doing the voting or perhaps even the candidates themselves.

    With that in mind, can we really be sure Michlmayr received all those votes or is he just really good at coding back doors?
    </tongue firmly planted in cheek>

    (In all seriousness, though, congrats to Martin and all the other candidates. You've got a lot more courage than I, taking on a task that big. Best of luck!)

  • I get the feeling his suggestion of getting drunk with other developers helped. ~
  • Rock beats scissors, I won!

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