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."

Re:Just an observation

[wanderingknight]

Debian is essentially the same as Ubuntu. But if you know your way around Linux, every distro is essentially the same.

Ubuntu is build on Debian

[wizards_eye]

having used both extensively, I'd say they're remarkably similar, though in debian you do have to do a few more things manually.

That is probably Debian is "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built". http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian [ubuntu.com]

Link to Article

[ArIck]

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 [ualberta.ca]
[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]

Re:Just an observation

[ThePhilips]

When will the Ubuntu crowd come to their senses and finally understand that they are in fact running a DEBIAN system?

LOL. Whole point of Ubuntu that users (the "crowd") do not have to care about - least understand - what they are running.

Ubuntu is made for end-users as an OS which just runs and doesn't require any understanding of what and how it does.

That's pretty much why Ubuntu != Debian.
Debian is technology - for engineers and advanced users who want total control over their system.
Ubuntu is product - for those who used to buy stuff off the shelf and want it to just work.
Feel the difference.

Re:Just an observation

[fdfisher]

Ubuntu is *not* Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but has very different priorities.

Debian supports 11 hardware architectures. Ubuntu supports only 3, and as a result can provide much more polished results.

Likewise, Debian maintains 18,000+ packages. Ubuntu maintains significantly fewer packages, but provides much more polished packages for the ones they do maintain.

Debian has militant standards for stability, often leading the software in their stable release to be a couple years behind the curve. On the other hand, Ubuntu releases an entirely new version of their operating system every 6 months, officially supports most releases with security updates for only a short amount of time, and often includes software in their stable release which has not even been officially released by its developers (such as Firefox 3.0 in the upcoming Hardy Heron release.) I.e. Ubuntu's priority is decisively on bleeding-edge software over stability.

Debian is highly customizable and allows you to choose precisely what software you want to install and how you want it configured; it is easy to see what's going on under the hood. Ubuntu is much more mysterious; it's much more difficult to understand what's going on under the hood and much more difficult to customize and reconfigure, but as a result, is more user friendly and easier to install.

Debian is horizontally organized through an ambitious system of democratic (and highly idealistic) self-governance. Ubuntu is run from the top down by a corporation with very limited democratic participation from its constituents.

Perhaps most important of all, Debian has super strict standards for what constitutes free software. Ubuntu's standards are also marginally strict compared with the industry average, but there is a lot of software that Ubuntu permits to be configured and installed by default through the distribution that Debian refuses to support or will not install by default because they consider it non-free. This has been a long standing source of tension between the Debian community and Ubuntu.

In short, both Debian and Ubuntu are great distributions, but Ubuntu is NOT Debian; it has very different priorities. QED