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Debian GNU is Not Unix Software Linux

Debian Project Nominations Opened 106

Posted by timothy from the deep-infrastructure dept.
robstah writes "The Debian project have announced the opening of nominations for this year's Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections. The first nomination, that of Matthew Garrett (of Dasher fame) has also been announced on Debian Planet."
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Debian Project Nominations Opened More

Debian Project Nominations Opened

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  • RMS? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:30PM (#11593602) Journal
    Other than maybe Eben Moglen, I can't think of anyone who would defend the purity of Debian more strongly than Richard Stallman. The Debian project has always been about providing a Free operating system that works great rather than a semi-Free operating system. This is in line with RMS's original goal of Hurd (which is booting now!).

    Let Freedom ring!
    • RMS is not eligible to stand because his new maintainer application has been stalled at the tasks and skills phase due to a lack of time on his part... :P

    • Re:RMS? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      G'day Mr Troll,

      RMS plays an important part in the free software world, but he would not be suited to a role such as leading Debian. Leadership of such a project requires compromise, and RMS freely admits that he is not going to compromise his Free Software ideals (and he is right not to).

      I think you know this too, and are just tryng to start a shit fight. Get lost.

    • Well considering RMS has declared Debian as not falling in line with the pure GNU philosophy by providing closed apps, I would say that he would be one of the worst people to head up the project.

    • Re:RMS? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by psamuels ( 64397 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:49PM (#11593689) Homepage

      Guess that depends on what you mean by freedom. Richard Stallman disagrees quite publicly with the Debian Project in the matter of the GNU Free Documentation License the Project does not consider it sufficiently free.

      Some of you will think it is heresy to regard a license from the Free Software Foundation as insufficiently free. Heresy or not, though, I agree with the Debian Project: the GFDL imposes some onerous restrictions [debian.org] on what users can do with the licensed work, and Stallman seems unwilling to drop some of these restrictions.

      As it happens (bringing us back on topic), the first nominee for Debian Project Leader 2005, Matthew Garrett, features prominently in the above document detailing why RMS's documentation license is not free enough.

      • I think a lot of the complaints about the GFDL are overblown. Personally, I've never even run across a GFDL'd document that contains any invariant sections, etc., and nearly all of the objections seem to be completely irrelevant if the document doesn't have any of those things in it. (I do dislike the political nature of the preamble, the length of the license, and the difficulty of understanding what consititutes a transparent copy.)

        But anyway, if Debian doesn't like the GFDL, what does it like better? Th

        • If "nobody uses" invariant sections, front-cover or back-cover texts, and those parts of the license make it nonfree, then why are they in the license?

          Even if it were true, that nobody uses them is irrelevant. If someone specified "GFDL with no invariant sections or *-cover texts" then Debian is okay with that anyway.

        • I think a lot of the complaints about the GFDL are overblown. Personally, I've never even run across a GFDL'd document that contains any invariant sections, etc.

          Several GNU manuals include the GNU Manifesto as an invariant section -- in fact, I can't back this up, but it certainly appears that the main motivation for the invariant section clause was specifically to prevent people from removing the GNU Manifesto from GNU manuals.

          As others have said, there are quite a few onerous and ambiguous clauses in th

        • Yes, CC attribution-sharealike is I think the preferred license. Personally I go for a little gem called the Design Science License that's hidden away on the GNU website.

          In the meantime, they treat GFDL docs the same way they treat propriety software. Which is the only thing they can do. Although IMO something with no invariants is currently free, just could become non-free, and should be treated like BSD-licensed software.

  • why every year? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:37PM (#11593635)
    how do you get anything done when the leader is changing every year?

    Sounds like democracy on steriods. large projects need benevolent dictators!

    • Re:why every year? (Score:3, Informative)

      by krmt ( 91422 )
      That was tried before. It didn't work out so well. The mailing list archives were deleted with a nice "fuck you all."

    • Re:why every year? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr.Ned ( 79679 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:58PM (#11593737)
      FreeBSD and NetBSD seem to get a lot done without a benevolent dictator. One reason for their success may be that there aren't as many 'developers' with commit access - they don't have a 'developer' for every two or three programs in the archive as Debian does.

      On a different scale, the Apache project is quite successful without a benevolent dictator, and it's just one of many.
      • They also have less to do. In the case of FreeBSD that means they support less architectures, and put in less work on their non-core "ports" packages. Of course NetBSD supports every architecture there is, but has relatively few packages if I remember.

        I'll readily agree that Debian could be much, much more efficient. But it should be remembered that they're trying to do quite a bit more than most other projects.

    • Re:why every year? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Master Bait ( 115103 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @11:07PM (#11593785) Homepage Journal

      Hey, I got an idea! Maybe they should work out a system where Debian has three presidents, one elected per year for a three year term on a quasi-lazy Susan, stack-based basis.

      The newest president would be called Testing and everybody would go to him for real everyday issues. The second president (second year in office) would be called Unstable and he would work with the greybeards out in the field helping tham to keep their ancient computers running. Then, in the last year in office, the president would be called Stable and he (or she) appears on panels at universitys and trade shows and awards dinners.

    • RTFC (Score:2, Informative)

      by mincognito ( 839071 )
      large projects need benevolent dictators!

      Or a well-formed constitution: http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution [debian.org]

  • Damn that's SMALL LINUX (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get the tiny Debian [damnsmalllinux.org]

  • Politics... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:43PM (#11593666)
    A wise man once said: If Debian spent less time encouraging politics and more time developing, packaging and testing, Debian stable would have more up2date software versions.

    I forgot who said it. Doesn't matter anyway.
    • This should be modded Insightful, not Funny...

      As far as I'm concerned, Debian is a joke precisely because they put so much damn emphasis on politics. It's pathetic, really.

    • Re:Politics... (Score:4, Informative)

      by jrcamp ( 150032 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @11:53PM (#11593917)
      Debian seems to get along just fine. The stable branch, by its definition, does not receive new versions of software once it is released. It only receives backported security patches.

      Testing and unstable, on the other hand, are more current versions of software.
    • That ain't the way I Hurd it!

      </joke>
    • You clearly have no idea what 'stable' means. Look into how often RHEL changes.
    • A wise man once said: If Debian spent less time encouraging politics and more time developing, packaging and testing, Debian stable would have more up2date software versions.

      Therefor, your wise man is an utter moron who hasn't the faintest clue about Software in the Public Interest's ambition. Debian is the largest software distribution out there, on 13 architectures and three kernels. It takes a long time to port and test all that.

    • You could say that about any corporate software development house too. The reality is that the process instills trust and a sense of reliability in the customer (the user). The customer knows what to expect from Debian, and knows that this won't change tomorrow, because the reins of the project won't be arbitrarily handed over to a new person who happens to be ill-suited for the job either in technical ability or temperament.
    • I already replied to this, but found another post [slashdot.org] that says the same thing in (IMO) better words.

  • Only developers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:47PM (#11593681) Homepage
    I'm a little intrigued that the project leader position appears to only be open to developers. Perhaps it's done to ensure that the leader is aware of all of the complications involved at lower levels, but I have to wonder if it's always best to have a project led by one of the foot soldiers.

    • Re:Only developers? (Score:3, Informative)

      by krmt ( 91422 )
      Debian Developers all have GPG keys that are signed by other Debian Developers, and are thus in the web of trust. The project would have no way of verifying that someone outside that web of trust even exists. Furthermore, their conduct within the project allows an easy reference point in choosing a candidate.

    • Re:Only developers? (Score:4, Informative)

      by psamuels ( 64397 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @10:58PM (#11593736) Homepage

      "Developers" really means "members of the Project". The term refers to the reality that Debian is a technical project and doesn't have a lot of need for people who can't do actual software development.

      As for why only Project members can be the Project Leader, that's pretty common in organisations of all sorts.

  • The question is: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Living WTF ( 838448 )
    Will "sarge" become "stable" under the new leader?
    Or is this going to become some "Real Soon Now" / "When It's Done" thingie?

    • Re:The question is: (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 07, 2005 @12:44AM (#11594052)
      Will "sarge" become "stable" under the new leader?

      The DPL does not have near as much control as someone might imagine. The single most important power of the DPL is the power to appoint developers to admin positions. Debian is less of a democracy than it is a bureaucracy. [debian.org]

      The Debian Constitution [debian.org] specifies how certain positions are appointed, and if you read carefully you'll see that many of these positions are completely immune to the DPL. The Project Secretary, for instance, has to agree with the DPL for a new Project Secretary to be appointed. OTOH, the Project Secretary can "delegated authority for a decision" without any outside review. They could, in fact, keep the title and appoint whoever they want to do the actual work.

      The Technical Committe is another group with no meaningful outside review. The DPL can only appoint Developers to the Technical Committe when the Committe itself recommends them. If the DPL refuses to appoint the members they recommend for so long that the committe gets down to 5 members, the committe can appoint new members without any input from the DPL.

      What about the other delegated positions? Technically the DPL appoints and removes these people without restrictions, but in reality his control over every single delegated position is limited. The Constitution states explicitly, "The Project Leader may not make the position as a Delegate conditional on particular decisions by the Delegate, nor may they override a decision made by a Delegate once made." Ok, so he can't fire someone because he disagrees with their decisions. But the constitution says delegates "may be replaced by the Leader at the Leader's discretion", so what does that mean? Quite simply it means that delegates are appointed for life. New DPL's don't get to appoint new delegates. To get rid os a delegate the DPL would have to come up with precise reasons for removing them that are unrelated to the technical decisions the delegate has made.

      And where do you really see this in action? The single delegate most often complained about is the DAM. He has complete veto power over who gets to join the project and can kick any developer out of the project. For up to six months at a stretch the DAM will refuse to do any work related to the position he has been delegated. In fact, it got so bad recently that the DAM allowed another developer to take over all of the actual DAM work while still remaining in the DAM slot.

      And where do the unacountable delegated positions fit into the organization of Debian? Everything that Debian does gets passed through a delegate at some point. The FTP-Masters have veto power over every package. The DAM has veto power over who gets to join the project. The Technical Committe has veto power over policy decisions. And even worse than that, many of the different delegate positions are held by the exact same people. Pick a few members out of the organizational list and look at all of the different positions they hold....now try to imagine any DPL attempting to oust one of these developer from one of their delegated positions.

      So....will a new DPL be able to work harder and get Sarge out the door? Of course not. They can beg or whine about it, but Debian's bureaucracy holds all the real power to make things happen. The DPL title is a little perk that core members of the bureaucracy [debian.org] pass around from time to time.

      Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to suggest that all of the delegates in Debian are evil people or anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that voting != democracy and DPL != control.

    • Re:The question is: (Score:5, Informative)

      by asackett ( 161377 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @01:12AM (#11594194) Homepage
      Debian's releases are always done when they're done. If you want sarge, install sarge -- I've been using it for many moons on production systems. The occasional breakage is still less than what some other distributions shove out the door in their production releases.

      I seem to recall a breakage some time ago... think think think... it was a naming conflict between djbdns and the Courier MTA both wanting to install some support program or other. It was an easy enough fix. Other than that, I've had no trouble out of it in either server or workstation usage.
  • ...of Dasher fame? He hasn't done anything else? That's his qualification? Some people take Democracy too far.

    I'll admit Dasher is kinda cool but its really not all that complex. It'd be like MS putting the guy who thought up MouseKeys in charge of Windows.
  • How about nominating someone who will put a higher priority on getting Sarge out the door than on the purity issues?

    I like Debian's reliability and I've used debian as my primary OS since around '96. I also live in the real world where non-OSS commercial software gets used. The libraries in Woody have gotten too far behind current. Sarge needs to get out the door soon if Debian is going to remain viable outside of the core clique of maintainers.
  • I ran Debian for a year or two around 1999-2000. I liked many parts of it, but over time I got frustrated of following its progress since it was so slow. I have followed several Debian project leader elections over the years, at a distance, by reading the candidate's programs, and no matter who is elected, the slow progress continues. I must say - what difference do they really make? I understand that there could be lots of important stuff being done in the background, but my impression of Debian is that it

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